ETRUSCAN, TUSCANS and INTEGRATING WHAT THIS MEANS
by Robert Baird
It is my opinion that Napoleon's Tuscan heritage was in his family legends and though not provable to the College of Brienne it was enough for General Marboeuf to get him into this school for the nobility. I think the Etruscans were a lot like their Sybarite allies and before the Battle of Alalia they were working the drug trade in league with Carthage. The falling out between Carthage and these truly Sybaritic and corrupt people is important. There are reasons why these same families do what they do in the present day that we are not told about, I suspect. This quote from another of my books will not do the detailed work to show the Etruscan origins in Lydia or Smyrna nearby; it will be left to you to read books like Etruscan Life and Afterlife to see the debate and how stupid it really is.
'The fiction of Romulus and Remus who were descendants of Aeneas was helpful to certain priestly activities and is still spoken of in terms that imply there is some basis in fact behind the legend other than a statue placed many centuries later, by two Roman magistrates (296 BC.). When I lived in Rome's sister city of Cincinnati I used to go to a park overlooking their seven hills and the Ohio River where a replica of this statue maintains this fiction or symbol of stupidity. That is not to suggest wolves weren't caring creatures and that they might not have helped two babies through a rough time. The wolves became dogs and were often with early humans and used in the hunt as well as war. The drawings from the Sahara dated to 7,000 BC show them with their men friends, who I think were Berbers and half breed Phoenicians that chose to leave the 'hoity-toity' aristocratic evolving land of Egypt.
It doesn't matter a great deal if history and archaeology don't have a clear idea of what exact date Troy of the Aeneid actually fell. It would be nice if they actually could prove a point, but we can proceed to explore the important aspects of what happened even if it was the Hyksos time frame of 'Sea People's' some six centuries earlier. The story may have been fudged to fit some verbal history as far as dates go; and even a number of different events may have been jumbled into one. It is very likely that that is the case. As a result other historians have also seemed to make things fit together, which is the normal outcome, of this supposed history we are often taught is fact. Recent archaeological discoveries are a great deal more exact and they seem to fit a truer picture of what our long term history is really all about. It is a welcome fact for example that we hear about the 'Beaker people' coming to the British Isles in the 3rd millennium BC from an area such as Hallstatt and that we see the Old European civilization predated them in the Danube.
The fact that the Danubians of Gimbutas had a language though may not have had (though it appears to us and the experts at Helsinki's University) a refined alphabet is an interesting academic study in denial. It was 2,000 years before cuneiform, and that is a fact that must be integrated into any picture of what we are. It fits the time frame Strabo said the other Iberians in Tartessus had a 7000 year written history.
The facts relating to the founding of Etruria make a lot more sense when we consider these movements of advanced people, than earlier historians were willing to allow (like Donald Strong). We saw the issue of the Phoenicians of Tyre and that Royal family that produced the Biblical Jezebel resulting in the last great woman to found a civilization (who historians have tried to discredit) in the person of Dido. Around this same century Etruria is acknowledged to have been created. This doesn't seem to us to be unrelated and it shows a powerful group of Phoenicians may have been planning and doing other things. The Carthaginians of Tyre and their Sybarite and Etruscan allies fought at the Battle of Alalia in 520 BC but shortly thereafter the Bruttii and Veneti who were their egalitarian brothers that had moved north came to set things straight. But first let us look into the fiction that the Romans wanted to make into their history a little more.
This story might seem overly childish and easy to see as a farce but it is the kind of thing that has been sold to people who would believe almost anything because it is written or mouthed by respected people. The idea of mummification leading to immortality still seems to be something some people think was the actual process, just because they know the Pharaohs were seeking after immortality and because they found them in mummified condition. There is a spiritual growth of soul reason and there are other factors which often go unreported, as I hope you might tell your children searching for Easter eggs. That story includes a thousand years of war and persecution against the people of Ireland because they wouldn't deify Jesus and sell that Resurrection fiction.
We know that caves are special for early man for reasons other than what we were taught in school after the Lascaux caves were found. The grottos and cenotes of the world are the best places to feel the energy at the root (literally often) of nature. When they have springs and rivers to luxuriate in or rest by an open fire they are wondrous places to hear the chanting of spiritual things. One of these caves was the site of priestly efforts at the foot of the Palatine Hill that became the annual site of the 'Fabiani' and 'Quintiales' purification and rebirth rituals. The Phoenician oracles had prophesized the founding of a great culture and empire by two brothers who would be raised by a wolf. In 296 B.C. two Roman magistrates gained a lot of kudos for erecting the statue at the Lupercal in honour of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. (16) The Latin word 'lupa' may also be a factor in the foundation of this story. 'Lupus' is Latin for wolf and 'Lupa' is their word for 'whore'. The farmer who worked the area probably had a wife who cared for these two brothers from an aristocratic family. I find this derivation of the founding of the worst Empire with a continuing effect on man (through their excellent rebirth as a Holy Empire of Catholicism) quite to my liking.
Still the legend of Aeneas has the ring of some factual basis and the timing of other things that few even comment about are tied in with this legend. Livy comments on something that many others agree about when he said something that mirrors the Phoenician attitudes toward spirituality.
"The Etruscans are a nation more than any other dedicated to religion, the more so as they excelled in practising it."
Doing matters much more than lip service to be sure and I believe they were more inclined to egalitarianism as were their aristocrats, than the Greek or other remnants they left behind in Peloponnesian (Achaea or Greece). The theory that the Etruscans came from Lydia is close to the truth as I see it as well.
In the interest of brevity and because there is so little definitive proof I hope the reader can allow us some leeway as we try to tie the bigger picture together. This bigger picture has to do with a growing and changing commercial empire that cared little for the actual control of all people, once they saw it was impossible to achieve directly. They worked behind the scenes in some cases and in other cases they even fought amongst their former brothers or corporate partners. The Phoenicians can be said to be the forerunners of the 'octopus' that we see as the Masons and Bilderbergs or Merovingians of today. To what extent we can name specific individuals who were early organizers of these behind the scenes deals will be a great deal of guesswork except in the case of Tuthmosis and Pythagoras.
Alexander the Great who did a lot of interesting things including taking a glass submersible to the bottom of the Sea, and his effort to find the Emerald Tablet of Hermes and create one picture of culture (as an innovator of propaganda) is definitely here too. Polybius was an historian who also explored and may have gone to the Americas after his life as an adopted son of the Scipio scions of Rome. There are lots of individuals but our history will have little to offer in the way of intimate histories. The lesbians of Lesbos will seem quite justified in their regard for women rather than the men who abused women; and the Spartan or Cretan homosexuals aren't nearly as bad as other slavers we think.
Mr. Grant brings us a great deal of information to try to digest in his excellent scholarship that includes an ability to see through legend and incorporate archaeological and artistic developments. The racial and political ties are often unimportant in the Phoenician Brotherhood because they attracted free-thinking and hard-working individuals. With the increase in war and slavery their populous city-states were often over-run with people and pirates alike.
"...this Milesian territory, limited by its mountainous boundary, and restricted and endangered by the appearance of the Cimmerians and the rise of the Lydian state, became a source of internal social strife, because its concentration in the hands of only a few landowners angered those members of the rising mercantile class who did not possess land of their own. The outcome of this problem was an outstanding phenomena in the history of Miletus, namely the dominant part the city played in the foundation of Greek colonies in distant lands.
The region upon which its adventurous seamen and businessmen concentrated, with contributions from other states (since additional settlers and investments must have been needed), were those adjoining the Propontis (Sea of Marmara) and Black Sea, in order to acquire the unlimited supplies of grain that lay beyond, in southern Russia, as well as to catch the tunny-fish moving down into the Mediterranean every year. For these enterprises the two north-east passages, the Hellespont (Dardanelles) and the Thracian Bosphorus, had to be traversed. From a nautical point of view, these were perilous operations. But Milesian sailors soon found out that helpful south-westerly breezes, and favourable eddies among the currents, could be picked up along the shores, and that even in summer, when northerly winds instead prevailed, a ship could pass through on the night breeze that blew up the two straits; and then when the time came to return, the northerly winds brought it safely back home again.
In these areas, the Hellespont, Propontis and Black Sea, the Milesians founded a number of colonies, estimated at a total variously reckoned at thirty and a hundred, and perhaps not too far from the latter total, once foundations by satellites of Miletus are included in the list (Herodotus is his source). For a considerable period, that is to say, the Black Sea and its approaches became virtually a preserve of the Milesians. At Black Sea centres such as Olbia, for example, it was probably a series of goldsmiths sent from Miletus who provided the Scythians with their lavish gold-work."(17)