Aztec Treasure House. Evan S. Connell
from Lucien Bonaparte’s widow, the workmen divided whatever they found into two groups: jewelry, richly painted Greek vases and so forth, which fetched a good price, on one side; everything of slight commercial value, such as bucchero dishes, on the other side. Whereupon, says Dennis, everything of little or no value was deliberately smashed. Widow Bonaparte did not want to dilute the market. “At the mouth of the pit in which they were at work, sat the capo, or overseer—his gun by his side. . . .”
One is reminded of Genghis Khan destroying what he was unable to use because he could not imagine what else should be done with it. Or Diego de Landa burning the elegant Mayan codices. Or those Mohammedan soldiers who broke into the library at Alexandria and helped themselves to 700,000 books—fuel enough to heat the public baths for six months.
Today what remains of Etruria?
A stone leopard. Dice. Chariot fragments. Several lead discs. An ivory writing tablet. Those three sheets of gold. Odd, mysterious items such as the bronze handle picked up at Fabbrecce, near Città di Castello, which shows a man wearing a crown of leaves, arms raised, with a dog or a lion on the ring above his head—with a human arm issuing from the animal’s mouth! What does it mean? Or the engraved ostrich egg from Quinto Fiorentino. An ostrich egg with Etruscan lettering. What about that?
And the Capitoline wolf—emblem of Rome. We have this wild bronze mother, which probably was cast at Veii during the fifth century before Christ. Romulus and Remus, the sucklings, who crawled beneath her sometime during the sixteenth century, are meant to symbolize how Rome drew nourishment from Etruria.
So we have all this and more. Quite a lot more. But if one item alone testifies to the fugitive existence of these people it must be the ivory writing tablet. On its surface are traces of wax and some very old scratches; therefore we assume that an Etruscan stylus scratched the tablet.
Professor Luisa Banti, terse and formidable, says no. Without qualification: No.
We assume the tablet belonged to a child because of its small size and because an alphabet has been cut into the rim, just as you see our alphabet printed in bold letters on the cover or first page of a child’s tablet.
Professor Banti does not waste time on this sentimental hypothesis. Instead, she offers two explanations, not mutually exclusive, for the small size and for the presence of an alphabet. First, the tablet may have been symbolic. Writing was then a new art in Etruria and the personage with whom it was buried wanted everybody to know that he could write. Second, the tablet might have been used for practice. If you have trouble forming letters you need a model.
The argument that Etruscan adults needed a model abecedary is tenuous but convincing: the alphabet was engraved also on quite a few miniature vases and these vases are thought to have been “inkpots”—containers for the red or black liquid that served as ink when writing on papyrus.
Regardless of who owned this tablet or how it was used, it must have been a delightful possession because one could magically erase the letters by waving a baton of hot metal over the wax. A hole drilled through the handle implies that there was a string, meaning it probably was worn like a necklace.
Such things—objects accompanying a funeral—are the most reliable guide to Etruria, as long as they are studied without preconceived theories. They are the one true Etruscan source, says Banti, “the only one unaltered by personal ideas, or by the interpretations and prejudices of the ancient writers whose works we use as historical sources. Archaeological finds are the archive documents of antiquity, documents that have to be studied patiently in museums and in excavation diaries. They are safer and more credible than the scant information handed down by ancient Greek and Latin historians.”
We could almost fill a railroad train with Etruscan bric-a-brac. Corroded swords, dented bronze helmets, pots, plates, boxes, flasks, cinerary urns, mirrors, figurines, antefixes, cylinders, and so on. And yet, paradoxically, we don’t seem to have nearly enough. We hunt for more and more, perhaps because it’s easy to imagine how much has been lost.
What else remains?
Inside those odd funerary beehives that dot the Tuscan hillsides we come upon stained murals whose colors evoke memories of Crete and Egypt—pink, green, black, white, red, yellow—though the sensibility is Etruscan. Some of them cross the centuries between us like a bolt of lightning. A mural at Chiusi shows a charioteer who has just been pitched out of his vehicle: a moment from now he will land on his head. We can understand this. We appreciate and comprehend his problem. One can empathize with him more easily than with a Cretan acrobat somersaulting over the horns of a bull.
All right, we have these disintegrating murals. What else?
Sundry goods. Everyday merchandise. Scraps of apparel. Here and there a tantalizing curiosity.
In the National Museum of Yugoslavia stands a rigid female mummy shaped like a cudgel, or a Giacometti sculpture, or one of those elongated prehistoric Sardinian bronzes; and what is unique about this mummy is that, although it turned up in Egypt, the linen wrappings are covered with Etruscan liturgical formulas. Furthermore, what was written on the bandages has no connection with the burial. The linen contains 1,185 words, evenly spaced, written in red. Allowing for repetitions and illegible areas, there are 530 different Etruscan words, only a few of which can be translated. Vinum is obvious, and some others are not difficult for philologists: fler meaning an offering or sacrifice, tur meaning to give, ais or eis being the word for god. But most of the text is indecipherable: “cilths spurestres enas ethrse tinsi tiurim avils chis . . .”
Now the red-haired young woman stands naked in Zagreb, her leathery brown body stripped of its last garment, the one thing about her that excited professionals. Nobody knows her name or where she came from. Eca suthi . . . But then what? She could have been Egyptian, she could have been Etruscan. The linen roll probably was brought to Egypt by Etruscan colonists during their migration from Lydia about the ninth century B.C.—assuming such a migration did take place—or brought by a wealthy Etruscan family fleeing the Roman encroachment.
So much for scholarship.
You can visit Etruria with no trouble. Every morning the tourist buses leave Rome, air-conditioned buses with multilingual guides. They will take you to Cerveteri and Tarquinia and other famous sites. Or you can go by yourself and walk along the dusty paths, which may well be those the Etruscans used—because paths, like pots, last indefinitely. And you get the feeling that not much has changed. In midsummer the bloated purplish flies have no fear; they believe they are entitled to stick to your face. Pale blue blossoms of rosemary decorate the low hills, thick with prickly shrubs, and there is a sense of the Tyrrhenian Sea not far off.
You can visit the places where they lived and search the hills and enter the caves and burrows overgrown with trees. Uneasily you look at the cippi—stone symbols outside their tombs, a phallus to show that a man lies within, a house with a triangular roof to indicate a woman. That is to say, you can find the Etruscans—if you pretend. Because of the murals and painted ceramics, because of what you have been told or have read, you dimly perceive them. Almost. But it doesn’t quite work. Imagination fails. There is no authentic Etruscan sound, no touch of an Etruscan hand, nor the odor of a plump Etruscan body. They seem to be present, yet they are not.
At last you return comfortably to Rome on the bus, having been told about Etruscans; or you return by yourself, exhausted and sweaty and confused, knowing no more, the past unrecaptured.
A Roman art dealer named Augusto Jandolo got a little closer. When he was a boy in Tuscany he watched as the sarcophagus of a Tarquinian nobleman was opened. The great stone cover was difficult to lift; but finally it rose, stood on end for a moment, and fell heavily aside. Then, says Jandolo, he saw something that he would remember until his dying day:
Inside the sarcophagus I saw resting the body of a young warrior in full accoutrements, with helmet, spear, shield, and greaves. Let me stress that it was not a skeleton I saw; I saw a body, with all its limbs in place, stiffly outstretched as though the dead man had just been laid in the grave. It was the appearance of but a moment. Then, by the light of the torches, everything seemed to dissolve. The helmet rolled