Furniture, pottery and terracotta tiles were among the objects found at the site of the Etruscan house.
Posted on 06/05/2011 10:23:01 AM PDT by Renfield
Italian archaeologists have discovered the first-ever intact Etruscan house, complete with furniture, bricks and terracotta tiles identical to the ones still used in Tuscany today.
Found at an archaeological site called Poggiarello Renzetti in the Tuscan town of Vetulonia, some 120 miles north of Rome, the 2,400-year-old building has been only partially excavated.
Constructed in the Hellenistic period between the third and first century B.C., the house, about 33 by 50 feet, consisted of a basement to store foodstuffs and a residential area where the rather wealthy owner lived with his family.
Although only a storage room has been brought to light by a joint team from a local archaeological museum and the Archaeological Superintendency of Tuscany, the standing ruins have been already hailed as an exceptional find....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
Furniture, pottery and terracotta tiles were among the objects found at the site of the Etruscan house.
Etruscan ping.
“These fun-loving and sensuous people” - the archeologists found another frat house and Discovery thinks it’s news.
NO NO NO.
It says "light by a joint team. Not "light a joint team"...
I have a 5” high bronze Etruscan horse sitting on my desk. May they find the exact duplicate so I can retire.
What if you weren't well paid??
I’ve always been fascinated by the Etruscans. They were a mystery already by Claudius’ day. The language having been long dead in contrast to Phoenician (which some then contemproary scholars had a vague understanding of).
The Etruscan’s, liberal left of fairly degenerate Roman mores, would be hailed today by leftist leaning NY and San Francisco.
Interesting the article describes them as ‘fun loving sensuous people’. Fun loving?
The city of Pompeii was founded by the Etruscan’s and retained their customs.
In Pompeii, first century, all variations of sexuality were openly and blatantly pursued. Homosexuality, group orgies and pedophilia were widely accepted as normal behavior.
It has been argued that mores of Pompeii reflected the norm in general Etruscan society.
Ohhhhhhhh...Well, then they won’t get as many applicants for that team.
But did they have granite countertops? If they had granite countertops, well, then, you could maybe sell it. The real estate market is slow, but granite countertops still sell. Did it have a jacuzzi bathtub? Evreyone knows that women are the decision makers in buying homes. Granite countertops and jacuzzi bathtubs. Oh, and underground sprinkling. Those Etrucans could have all the terracotta tile they want, but you ain’t moving a house in this market that don’t have granite countertops, jacuzzi bathtubs and underground sprinkling.
Part of a speech by Claudius survives on a bronze tablet found in Lyon in the 16th century. He goes off on a tangent talking about the Etruscan traditions concerning the figure the Romans called Servius Tullius (6th of the traditional 7 kings of Rome).
Little known is that the Etruscans were the online branch of the Truscans. Real nerds.
I hope they find more of this stuff and something to crack the Etruscan language.
Wasn't that a BBC reality show where contestants lived as pre-Roman Italians and mysteriously disappeared?
Thanks for the information! I'll have to remember to write the word eTruscans.
FL
Languages survived for thousands of years before there was any writing system in use anywhere. Probably the last speakers of Etruscan were peasants in some out-of-the-way village. The extension of Roman citizenship to the Italian allies after the Social War (90-88 BC) is thought to have caused the demise of the various non-Latin languages of Italy (other than Greek).
Only a few educated Romans with antiquarian interests, such as Varro, could read Etruscan. The last person known to have been able to read Etruscan was the Roman emperor Claudius (10 BC – AD 54), the author of a treatise in twenty volumes on the Etruscans, Tyrrenikà (now lost), who compiled a dictionary (also lost) by interviewing the last few elderly rustics who still spoke the language. Urgulanilla, the emperor's first wife, was Etruscan.3Source: Etruscan languageLivy and Cicero were both aware that highly specialized Etruscan religious rites were codified in several sets of books written in Etruscan under the generic Latin title Etrusca Disciplina. The Libri Haruspicini dealt with divination from the entrails of the sacrificed animal, while the Libri Fulgurales expounded the art of divination by observing lightning. A third set, the Libri Rituales, might have provided a key to Etruscan civilization: its wider scope embraced Etruscan standards of social and political life as well as ritual practices. According to the 4th century Latin writer Servius, a fourth set of Etruscan books existed, dealing with animal gods, but it is unlikely that any scholar living in the 4th century could have read Etruscan. The single extant Etruscan book, Liber Linteus, which was written on linen, survived only because it was used as mummy wrappings.
The archaeological museum in Perugia has a stone with an extensive Etruscan text inscribed on it.
They’ve been deciphering eTruscan for over a century now and they have about 100 words worked out. From what I heard, they won’t be able to decipher any more until Rosetta Stone comes out with an eTruscan language program. Based on the advertisement I seen, the State Department uses that. I have no idea why the State Department would teach their envoys eTruscan, but I’m just saying.
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