Angela
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There is nothing obvious, never found so far the smoking gun that show that Herodotus was right. Moreover there aren't archeological connections that link the Etruscans with ancient Ageans and actually the linguistic connection is due to one single inscription, the Lemnos stele. Etruscan language is not considered Indo-European so the connection with the Lydians is problematic as well, not to mention that there was no similar language to Etruscan in Anatolia. Furthermore all the genetic studies didn't prove a mass migration from Anatolia to Central Italy around 1000/800 BC neither the archeological nor the historical studies and Central Italy was already inhabited by a civilization called "Villanovan culture" branched from the Urnfield culture.
Well, there were certainly many contacts between Italy, Greece and Anatolia, one of the most important trade routes. Etruscans were known as experienced sailors and the Etruscan civilization passed through an Orientalizing period roughly at the same time of the archaic phase of ancient Greeks. The transformation of the "Villanovan culture" into the Etruscan civilization is most likely due also to these contacts but these contacts could date back to the Cardium Pottery culture as well because there is evidence that the Etruscan civilization developed in situ.
Herodotus could be right in the end, at least in terms of some elite migration from Lydia, but I've never understood why the other ancient authors who opined on the subject are never given as much credence.
Thucydides groups them together with the Pelasgians and associates them with Lemnian pirates and with the pre-Greek population of Attica, and as for the Greek Historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus:
"For this reason, therefore, I am persuaded that the Pelasgians are a different people from the Tyrrhenians. And I do not believe, either, that the Tyrrhenians were a colony of the Lydians; for they do not use the same language as the latter, nor can it be alleged that, though they no longer speak a similar tongue, they still retain some other indications of their mother country. For they neither worship the same gods as the Lydians nor make use of similar laws or institutions, but in these very respects they differ more from the Lydians than from the Pelasgians."
This comment goes to some of the points you raised about the language of the Etruscans and what it can tell us about their origin. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that a language even remotely similar to that of the Etruscans was spoken in the area of Lydia or any area in Anatolia at the time they are supposed to be living there. The Lydians spoke a decidedly Indo-European language, which most linguists seem to feel is decidedly not the case for Etruscan. There's also the fact that we have evidence of Etruscan trading in the Aegean, so I don't know why the stele would necessarily mean the Etruscans came from the east.
Is it possible Pallottino was on the right track and they were one of the Sea Peoples who brought down the Bronze Age Civiliations? That doesn't illuminate matters very much, however, because the "Sea Peoples" were probably a group of not necessarily related peoples. They could have been Italics, Cretans, other Greeks, people from the northern Aegean...Who knows? Maybe they were some late arriving steppe or Caucasus group. Aren't there some linguists who see a link to Indo-European languages? Then there's that reference to similarities to Uralic languages.
If the linguists could agree on some of these things we might actually get somewhere.
You know, I quite liked the idea that the Etruscans were fugitive Trojans. I've always sort of been on their side...never much of a fan of the cuckolded, vengeful Menelaus, or Agamemnon, murdering his own daughter, or even of Achilles, although I always liked the wily and clever Ulysses. To be honest though, ever since it started to seem that they might have been Indo-Europeans too I haven't felt quite the same way about ancient Troy. We all have our prejudices, although I try very hard not to let them interfere with intellectual analysis.
Anyway, figuring out the linguistics is above my pay grade, and we've gotten sort of off topic from J1 in northern Italy and Tuscany.