Etruscan Orientalization

Ancient History
Editor-in-Chief
Lee L. Brice (Western Illinois University)
Editorial Board
Jeremy Armstrong (Early Rome) (Auckland University)
Denise Demetriou (Greece and Ancient Mediterranean)
(University of California)
Daniëlle Slootjes (Late Rome) (University of Amsterdam)
Georgia Tsouvala (Hellenistic and Roman Greece) (Illinois State University)

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Etruscan Orientalization
By

Jessica Nowlin

LEIDEN | BOSTON

This paperback book edition is simultaneously published as issue 3.2 (2020) of Ancient History,
DOI:10.1163/25425374-12340008
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Contents
Etruscan Orientalization 1
Jessica Nowlin
Abstract 1
Keywords 1
1 Introduction 1
2 The Beginnings of Art Historical Periodization 10
3 Etruscan Origins and Nationalism 18
3.1 Ancient Debates on Etruscan Origins 19
3.2 Interpretations of Etruscan Origins in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries 21
4 Orientalizing: The Birth of a Stylistic Term 29
4.1 Origins in Greek Art History 29
4.2 Italian Orientalizing: Between arte/periodo orientalizzante and the
Eastern Origin of the Etruscans 39
5 Orientalizing to Orientalization: From Period to Process 52
6 Recent Interpretations of Orientalizing and Orientalization 57
6.1 Aristocratic Banquet 59
6.2 Monarchy 63
6.3 Luxury 65
6.4 The Colonialist Transfer of a ‘Princely’ Way of Life 68
6.5 Postcolonial Interpretations 75
7 Conclusions: Abandoning the Term 81
Acknowledgments 85
References 85
Index 101

Etruscan Orientalization
Jessica Nowlin

The University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
jessica.nowlin@utsa.edu

Abstract
The terms ‘orientalizing’ and ‘orientalization’ have been employed to describe an art
historical style, historical period, and process of cultural interaction between East and
West within the early first-millennium BCE Mediterranean. With particular focus on
Etruria and Italy, this historiography explores the Orientalist framework at the heart of
‘orientalizing’ terms while outlining how modern political movements and ideologies
of nationalism and colonialism have influenced interpretations of ‘orientalizing.’ By
showing the political viewpoints underlying the origins of the term and the ways in
which these positions have continued to shape modern interpretations of the effects
of eastern imported objects, ideas, and practices in Etruria, this work argues that the
term ‘orientalizing’ should no longer be used. Instead, the period should be fit into
existing chronological periodizations, and the process of cultural change should be
interrogated outside of an Orientalist discourse.

Keywords
orientalizing – orientalization – etruscology – orientalism – nationalism – colonialism

1

Introduction

The terms ‘orientalizing’ and ‘orientalization’ have been employed to describe
an art historical style, historical period, and process of cultural interaction in
the early first-millennium Mediterranean.1 Objects that portray artistic motifs,
styles, and forms from the eastern Mediterranean and that are found in Italy,
Greece, and the western Mediterranean have been described as ‘orientalizing’

1 All dates BCE unless otherwise stated.

© Jessica Nowlin, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004473287_002

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and are considered representative of an ‘orientalizing’ style. The time marked
by the arrival of these objects, originally dated to between the eighth and
seventh centuries, is often referred to as the ‘orientalizing’ period within art
historical, historical, and archaeological chronologies. In addition to describing an art historical style and chronological period, the term ‘orientalization’
has been employed to describe the processes of cultural change among western Mediterranean peoples that was brought on by interaction with peoples,
objects, and ideas from the eastern Mediterranean. At the root of each of
these terms for period, style, and cultural process is the term the Orient. The
man-made geography indicated by ‘Orient’ is not simply a neutral reference
to the place from which these objects, ideas, styles, and cultural changes were
launched. Instead, the Orient evokes an essentialized view of the East by the
West and a geography of origins, the ancient birthplace of civilization, which
has been claimed by the peoples of Europe and the West.2 The onset of key
elements of civilization, such as the alphabet, government, art, organized religion, and urbanism, have been connected with the social and cultural developments of this period. The ‘orientalizing’ period, therefore, marks the time at
which ‘civilization’ arrived in the West.
The unexamined application of the Orient implicates ‘orientalizing’ and
‘orientalization’ in the discourse of Orientalism, as defined by Edward Said.3
Orientalism served to define Europe and the West based on its perceived distance from and superiority over an Eastern Other.4 Although modern Orientalism began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries within
Europe, for such a discourse to be viewed as legitimate, it needed to be able to
trace the roots of the divide back to the very beginning of Western civilization.
The ‘orientalizing’ period in Mediterranean history serves just this purpose.
Chronologically located immediately before the birth of the foundational cultures for Western civilization, ancient Greece and Rome, the ‘orientalizing’
period stands historically as a formative encounter between Western peoples
and Eastern ideas of government, artistic style, social relations, architecture,
and urbanism. The ‘orientalizing’ period not only marks the point at which the
West gains these trappings of civilization but also when Western peoples subsequently improve upon and fundamentally change these elements to create

2 The terms East, West, and Orient are capitalized to refer to the discourses created around
each through Orientalism rather than simple geographic indicators.
3 For a further discussion of the links between Orientalization and Orientalism, see Wengrow
2006.
4 Said 1978.

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the essential division between East and West that is at the heart of Orientalism
and Western identity.
The publication of Said’s work pushed many academic institutions to
reexamine and abandon their use of the term Oriental, but ‘orientalizing’
and ‘orientalization’ continue to be employed to varying degrees in the historiography of the ancient Mediterranean. That is not to say that these terms
have gone uncritiqued. Recent reconsideration of the terms’ use and definition in Mediterranean history can be credited to Corinna Riva and Nicholas
Vella’s edited volume, Debating Orientalization: Multidisciplinary Approaches
to Change in the Ancient Mediterranean (2006), which outlines a general historiography of the term, lays out the historical implications for modern definitions of Europe and the West, and provides case studies in the application of
the term in different ancient regions across the Mediterranean. Although the
book does not make an explicit call to cease the use of either ‘orientalizing’
or ‘orientalization,’ the criticisms levelled at these terms by the authors have
influenced subsequent study of the materials from this period and presumed
cultural effects of these objects, forcing scholars to acknowledge the limiting and problematic nature of these terms, discussed more explicitly later.5
Additionally, there have been examinations of scholarship on ‘orientalizing’
and ‘orientalization’ in Greek art history by Sarah Morris (1989, 1992) Thomas
Brisart (2011), and Ann Gunter (2009, 2014), as well as a recent volume considering Greek and Phoenician art in this period by S. Rebecca Martin (2017),
and on the study of eastern influence in Greek art and society, particularly as
conducted in German scholarship, by Suzanne Marchand (1996, 2010). These
works broaden the scope of scholarship beyond tracking changes in scholarly
interpretations to ask why we continue to be fascinated by the level of indebtedness of Greece to the Near East and to look at the implications of doing so
for modern European identity. As such, they provide a critical framework for
exploring historical trends in scholarship on ‘orientalizing’ and ‘orientalization’ in Etruria and Italy.
Although the terms ‘orientalizing’ and ‘orientalization’ have been employed
in numerous regions of the western Mediterranean, its modern cultural implications are most fraught for Italy and Greece, since the cultures of ancient
Greece and Rome have been touted as the torch bearers of Western civilization.6
5 For instance, a long-time scholar of the period in Etruria, Annette Rathje, noted the challenges made to the terms by Riva and Vella 2006 and proposed moving toward a more neutral
chronological marker based on numerical periods of the Iron Age (Rathje 2010, 23–24).
6 Gunter 2014 provides an excellent historiography of Orientalizing and Orientalization in
Greek art history.

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In Italy, the earlier prominence of Etruscan civilization when compared to
the development of Rome has meant that the effects of the ‘orientalizing’
period within the peninsula have primarily been studied for the Etruscans,
a group Alessandro Naso has called “the third civilization in western Europe
after Greece and Rome.”7 Located on the Tyrrhenian coast just to the north of
Rome, between the Tiber and the Arno Rivers, the Etruscans have long been a
unique focus of study first in Italian and then in international scholarship. The
study of the Etruscans, termed Etruscology, is similar to Egyptology in that it
focuses on the study of the people themselves in a holistic fashion, employing history, literature, art, inscriptions, and archaeology rather than a singular
methodology. In part this is because the Etruscans lie at the intersection of
prehistory and history, requiring methodologies from each to be able to build
a comprehensive picture of Etruscan culture.8 Such a methodological development, however, has separated the field disciplinarily from both prehistoric
archaeology and Classics.9,10 The initial acknowledgement that the Etruscans
represented the earliest ‘civilization’ on the Italian peninsula made their study
a deep source of pride and identity for Italian scholars from the Renaissance
onward. Thus, Etruscology has been influenced by broader Italian intellectual
and political developments that occurred throughout the discipline’s history.11
Since early Roman history and society was deeply influenced by their Etruscan
neighbors to the north, the ‘civilization’ established in ‘orientalizing’ Etruria
has direct implications on the subsequent development of the Roman empire
and, therefore, Western civilization. Consequently, building a critical historiography of Etruscan ‘orientalizing’ terminology that tracks the development
of this term across the history of Etruscology and the modern political movements in Italy and Europe has major implications for understanding Italian
and European self-presentation and identity.
The implications for ‘orientalizing’ and ‘orientalization’ in Etruria are fundamentally different than they are in Greece. Because of the debate on the
7
8
9
10

11

Naso 2017b, 1.
The same could also be said of Greek archaeology.
Recent comprehensive edited volumes in English have helped make the study of the
Etruscans more accessible to a wider audience (Turfa 2013; Bell and Carpino 2016; Naso
2017a).
For Etruscology, the separation from the field of Classics is also due to the focus of Clas­
sics on Greek and Roman texts to the exclusion of other Mediterranean peoples whose
literatures were discovered at a later date or whose understanding was primarily garnered
through archaeological sources.
Della Fina 2017.

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origins of the Etruscans, there has always been a question as to whether ‘orientalizing’ in Etruria represented the actual arrival of the Etruscans from Lydia
to Italian shores, a story originating in Herodotus’ Histories, or the adoption of
Eastern civilization by autochthonous Etruscans already well-situated along
the Tyrrhenian coast, as asserted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in Antiquitates
Romanae. If the Etruscans were in fact Eastern in origin, as asserted by most
ancient authors as shown below, the conflict between themselves and Rome
would then represent another foundational clash of Orientalism and could be
viewed as a natural parallel to that between Greece and Persia. Regardless of
their origins, the view of Etruscan civilization as Eastern has important implications for how Rome and later Europe represented the fundamental differences
between the Etruscans and Romans. Romans, while in many ways influenced
by the Etruscans, defined themselves by the ways in which they differed from
Etruria, essentializing the Etruscans and themselves in the process. The most
divergent characteristics of the Etruscans can be connected to Roman stereotypes of Eastern peoples, and the promotion of this view of Etruria by Roman
authors established the Eastern Etruscans as opposing representatives to their
own Roman values. This Roman Orientalism against Etruria is succinctly distilled in the heroic overthrow of Etruscan eastern luxury and tyrannical despotism by the pious and principled Romans at the foundation of the Republic.
The way we understand the changes brought on during the eighth and seventh
centuries in Etruria has important implications for how we picture both the
relationship between Etruria and Rome and the attributes of Western civilization that are thought to be uniquely Roman.
This study chronicles the creation and evolution of the terms ‘orientalizing’ and ‘orientalization’ in art history and Etruscology through chronological
and thematic sections that examine scholarly interpretations of the term and
material in light of broader intellectual trends and influences. The establishment and study of these terms in Etruria is tied to the earliest art historical
narratives, the debate on Etruscan origins, the pace of the discovery of antiquities, the gradual clarification of art historical chronologies, and the modern
political movements between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to the importance of Orientalism, modern currents of nationalism and
colonialism shaped the ways in which ‘orientalizing’ objects and the cultural
process of ‘orientalization’ were interpreted. The link between modern political trends and interpretations of antiquity continues until the current moment
through the application of postcolonialism and globalization within current
understandings of early first-millennium Mediterranean interaction, a shift
that seeks to push beyond ‘orientalizing’ and ‘orientalization’ terminology.

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As such, this historiography of ‘orientalizing’ and ‘orientalization’ provides a
broad exploration for how modern experiences of cultural interaction shape
our understandings of such encounters in antiquity.
The first section, “Beginnings of art historical periodization,” surveys the
earliest antiquarian and art historical works on Etruscan art during the eighteenth century to understand how the relationship between Etruria and eastern groups, such as the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Assyrians, was framed
prior to the coining of the term ‘orientalizing,’ since term this will come to
encapsulate the influences of eastern groups on the art of Etruria. Anne Claude
de Caylus, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Christian Gottlob Heyne each
address this issue in their larger antiquarian catalogues and grand histories of
art. Each of these works situates Eastern art as representing an earlier developmental stage of art that needed to be surpassed by Western groups, such as
the Etruscans and especially the Greeks. And while Caylus and Heyne envision
some degree of eastern influence on Etruscan art through commerce and trade,
Winckelmann only grudgingly acknowledges a limited influence on Etruscan
art by Egyptians or Phoenicians. Winckelmann downplays the importance of
eastern influence through the repeated characterization of eastern art and its
motifs in Orientalist tropes. Rather than ascribing Etruscan artistic development to eastern influence, Winckelmann believes the placement of Greek colonies within Etruria was the critical catalyst for both artistic and civilizational
evolution. The importance of Winckelmann’s framing of artistic development
as fundamental for broader changes in government and society, his Orientalist
dismissal of eastern art, and his foregrounding of Greek influence in Etruria’s
progress is evident in the creation and development of the definitions for ‘orientalizing’ art and ‘orientalization.’
The second section, “Etruscan origins and nationalism,” explores the deliberations surrounding where and when Western civilization was believed to
have originated and how Etruscan origins were situated within this question.
European nations during the late eighteenth century looked to the pre-Roman
groups within their borders as the historic precedent of their modern nation
state and competed for recognition as the first civilization, a body of knowledge which would later be diffused throughout Europe. For Italy, the Etruscans
were the historical focus of nationalist attention, but their much-debated origins made such a competition much more complex. This section lays out the
primary ancient explanations for the origins of the Etruscans by Dionysius of
Halicarnassus (autochthony), Herodotus (Lydia), and Hellanicus of Lesbos
(Pelasgians) and then discusses the positions of scholarship of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the question of origins. While German
scholarship asserted an origin for the Etruscans located north of the Alps in

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Rhaetia, Italian scholars were split between the Herodotean hypothesis, primarily promoted by Luigi Lanzi, and the position of autochthony asserted by
Vincenzo Cuoco, Angelo Mazzoldi, and Giuseppe Micali. The Italian promotion of autochthony for the Etruscans had strong strains of nationalism that
caused many of these historical works to be highly influential in the establishment of the Italian state during the Risorgimento. Such assertions of Etruscan
primacy, however, were forced to shift after the increased finds of the earliest civilizations in Egypt and the Near East and since chronologically later
Etruscan discoveries showed similarities in iconography and style to Eastern
materials. By the middle of the nineteenth century, figures like Giuseppe Micali
were forced to reconsider the source of Etruria’s civilization and accept that
Eastern knowledge had a profound effect on the development of the Etruscans
and, therefore, Italy. Even as such an intellectual shift was occurring, scholars
of this period infused Orientalist language into their histories to emphasize
the dramatic alterations Western groups, such as the Etruscans, made to this
transferred Eastern knowledge, making Eastern styles and practices conform
to Western stereotypes of civilization and structure.
The third section, “Orientalizing: the birth of a stylistic term,” is broken into
two parts; the first traces the creation and establishment of the term ‘orientalizing’ in Greek art history while the second illustrates how ‘orientalizing’
became employed in Etruscan art history and how it evolved to being used
as a chronological marker. The section begins with Greek art history because
during this period of scholarship Etruscan art was often considered a subset of
Greek art within narrative histories and because the term ‘orientalizing’ was
first coined in relation to Greek painted pottery styles by Alexander Conze. In
the ‘orientalizing’ style, Conze embedded an Orientalist framework by defining
the first period of Greek art (Geometric) by its differences from the subsequent
‘orientalizing’ style, characterizing the influence of eastern motifs in terms
of conflict between East and West, centering the Greeks as the active group
within the encounter. Conze defines the orientaliserende style based solely on
the decorative elements observed on pottery, just one of many material types
that will come be defined by the term ‘orientalizing.’ In using such a geographically obscure term, Conze erased any stylistic variation that could be discerned
between the art of different eastern Mediterranean groups. While other more
specific geographic terms were being used in Greek art history at this time to
describe eastern cultural influences, ‘orientalizing’ became the accepted term
for the Greek phase in large part because its Orientalist framework excluded
the East and froze any further development of Eastern art, omitting them from
the later development of the Western ideal. What began as a stylistic definition then evolves into a chronological marker for the intellectual and artistic

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conquest of the West over the East. From this beginning in Greek art history,
the second half of the section goes on to describe the use of ‘orientalizing’
in Etruscan art history, first as a stylistic description by Alessandro Della Seta
and then as a chronological marker by Pericle Ducati. Originally eschewed by
Italian scholars who believed the Etruscans had migrated from the East (and
therefore could not be ‘orientalized’), once Oscar Montelius situated this eastern migration chronologically earlier than the arrival of Greek ‘orientalizing’
objects, the term came to be employed in narratives on Etruscan art. Montelius
separates the period of Phoenician influence in Etruria from the later period
of influence by Greek ‘orientalizing’ material, an Orientalist division that is
codified by Ducati when he creates the periods l’arte orientalizzante più antica
and l’arte orientalizzante. In isolating eastern Phoenician influence from later
Greek influence, the significance of Phoenician influence is reduced by comparison to the Greeks, who are characterized as “emancipating” the Etruscans
from Oriental influence.
Section four, “Orientalizing to Orientalization: from period to process,”
describes how Massimo Pallottino changed ‘orientalizing’ from a description
of artistic style and chronological period to a larger change in cultural practices within Etruria. Pallottino’s theory on Etruscan origins focused on the
gradual formation over time of Etruria along the Tyrrhenian coast, a formation influenced by a number of different external factors and whose culmination was marked by the developments that characterized the ‘orientalizing’
period. In this conception of Etruscan formation, foreign influences could
be absorbed by local groups without wholesale population migration or conquest. This framework was critically developed by Pallottino in his writings on
modern colonial actions in Africa, where Fascist attitudes on race required cultural change and advancement to occur without the need for racial mixing. In
Pallottino’s conception of ‘orientalization,’ the positive benefits from Eastern
cultures that were transferred to the Etruscans brought them out of the stagnant realm of prehistory and into the wealth of a highly developed civilization.
By broadening the effects of contact between Etruria and the East to include
social changes, Pallottino laid the groundwork for modern interpretations of
the period that explore the arrival of banqueting, writing, more complex social
hierarchy, and government within an urbanizing Etruscan society.
The final section, “Recent interpretations of Orientalizing and Orientalization,” brings the historiography up to the modern day to explore how the
artistic style, period, and process are studied today and the ways in which the
earlier currents of Orientalism and colonialism have influenced modern interpretations. It considers scholarly positions on the primary cultural changes

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associated with this period of change in Etruria: banqueting, monarchy, and
the taste for tryphe (luxury). Each of these elements has been thought of in
conjunction to create a ‘princely’ way of life, which has been considered fundamental to the final stages of formation for the Etruscans by the end of the seventh century. The transfer of this eastern way of life continues to be shaped by
the colonialist framework first initiated by Pallottino for cultural change. The
most recent scholarship on the effects of this cultural interaction emphasizes
the active role of Etruscan aristocrats and others in selecting and adapting specific objects, styles, and practices within their own local context while building
an understanding of cultural change that is positioned within the longer local
history. Many of these approaches employ postcolonial theory and the frameworks of globalization, showing the continued influence of modern political
events and ideas on the scholarship of this period.
This examination of the deep history of the term ‘orientalizing’ reveals
the fundamental aim of the term: to describe the earliest encounter between
East and West in the Mediterranean basin. Rather than serving as an accurate or clarifying term for describing the outcomes of this interaction, the
term ‘orientalizing’ obscures the direct influences of peoples from the eastern Mediterranean and assumes a singular result for cultural change among
Western peoples. Although the nature of the term shifted over its usage based
on modern ideologies of nationalism, orientalism, and colonialism, our understandings of the outcome of this interaction has remained the same. The process of ‘orientalization’ has encapsulated the ways in which Western peoples
encountered Eastern ideas, objects, practices, and peoples, appropriated the
attributes considered most essential for the development of Western civilization, and then liberated themselves from any negative Eastern traits, leaving
the Orient frozen in an early stage of history. Beyond the obvious harm this
historical conception enacts toward understandings of the East, the continued use of the term ‘orientalizing’ hampers a more nuanced study of cultural
exchange within Etruria and the rest of the Mediterranean during the early
first millennium. As increasingly more scholarship has shown, this period saw
intensified connectivity and interaction across a wide range of peoples, and
each Iron Age group selectively appropriated ideas and materials within the
context of their own local tradition. The breadth of interaction calls for conceiving of the Mediterranean as a unitary whole rather than creating arbitrary
geographic divisions, particularly between East and West. Only by abandoning
the term ‘orientalizing’ can we move beyond an exclusively East–West axis and
expand scholarly understandings of how indigenous Etruscans and other Iron
Age peoples reacted to increased Mediterranean connectivity.

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The Beginnings of Art Historical Periodization

The term ‘orientalizing’ first comes into being as an art historical term for arts
of the eastern Mediterranean style. Prior to its coining, art history had established the parameters for understanding the encounter between East and West
through Etruscan art’s relationship to Egyptian and Phoenician art.12 Even
from this period, we see the beginnings of using modern stereotypes of the
East to interpret ancient art and modern mechanisms of cultural change to
explain the transfer of artistic practice. Following the creation of sixteenthand seventeenth-century universal histories that tracked the development of
civilization from its biblical birth in the Holy Land, through Greece and Rome
to northern Europe, eighteenth century antiquarianism sought to add art and
material objects to these literary histories by creating similar universal histories of artistic works and their development.13 Art was considered a critical
component of civilization, and its relative sophistication could be used as a
metric for the level of civilization achieved. Consequently, histories by key
figures, such as Anne Claude de Caylus, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and
Christian Gottlob Heyne, built narratives that were ordered chronologically in
terms of civilizational progress, cataloguing first the origins of art and then
its development in Egypt, Etruria, Greece, and Rome.14 This order established
Etruria as the initial link between Egypt and Greece, making it a key point of
transition between East and West. The connection between the advancement
of art and civilization in these histories built a narrative of cultural progress
that can be seen in later interpretations of ‘orientalization.’ While a simple cataloging of characteristic works of art like that of Caylus and Heyne avoided the
later discourses of colonialism and Orientalism, the more influential narrative
constructed by Winckelmann laid the foundations for later interpretations of
artistic and civilizational change through colonialism and an Orientalist disparagement of Eastern art.

12

13
14

There have been a number of recent works that have problematized the terms Phoenician
and Phoenician art. Martin (2017) argues for identifying a specific category of ‘Phoenician
art’ beyond the art of Canaanite and Levantine cities from the sixth century onwards
while Quinn (2018) has critiqued the use of the term “Phoenician” for describing the peoples of Levantine coastal cities and for ascribing a unified Phoenician identity to them.
López-Ruiz (2021, 15–19) provides an alternative perspective, pushing back against this
Phoenicoskepticism.
Patterson 1997.
For more on each of these figures in early Etruscan art history, see Bartoloni 2012, 24–28;
Cristofani 1976, 1983; Della Fina 2017; Harari 2017a; Riva 2018.

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The antiquarian Anne Claude de Caylus wrote a seven-volume work published between 1752 and 1765 that catalogued art from the four great civilizations of antiquity: Egypt, Etruria, Greece, and Rome.15 The catalogue provided
a brief introduction to the art of each civilization, outlining its predominant
characteristics and charting its influences before then providing plates and
descriptions of representative pieces in assumed chronological order from
early to later phases. Caylus ordered the civilizations to show the advancement
of art, with Etruria standing as the developmental link between the grand
but simplistic works of Egypt and the detailed and elegant works of Greece.16
While Etruria was developmentally between Egypt and Greece, it was the
Egyptians themselves who influenced Greek art rather than the Etruscans.
Within Etruria, Caylus asserted that evidence of Egyptian influence could
be seen in the shared use of lions and griffins, the reported use of pyramids
in the tomb of Porsena, and the comparable iconography and style within
certain catalogued Etruscan objects.17 Caylus explained Egyptian influence
on both Etruria and Greece as taking place through commerce rather than
through colonization, migration, or conquest. This stood in direct opposition
to Filippo Buonarroti’s hypothesis that the Etruscans had descended from the
Egyptians.18 Caylus believed the Etruscans could not have descended from
Egyptians because Etruscan monuments did not preserve a strong Egyptian
manner, the Etruscans practiced different religious ceremonies and crafts
unknown to the Egyptians (such as the working of terracotta), and most significantly, the Etruscans did not practice embalming and mummification.19 For
Caylus, these Egyptian influences were temporary and occurred early in the
history of Etruscan art. Gradually, the Etruscans departed from the Egyptian
tastes and customs that they first received and began to add greater detail to
their artwork, advancing artistic development.
The framework laid out by Caylus established the Egyptians as the inspiration for key aspects of Etruscan civilization but also ensured Etruscan independence, providing space for their own development. Artistic similarities
between these two groups were not employed to assert a large migration of
peoples from one place to another, as was asserted in the nineteenth century.
No specific term or periodization was assigned to this shared Egyptian influence on Etruria and Greece. Additionally, the presence of Egyptian influence
15
16
17
18
19

Caylus 1761.
Caylus 1761, 119; Cristofani 1983, 161.
Plates XXIX Nos. 1 and 2 and XXXII.
Cristofani 1978b, 605.
Caylus 1761, 78–79.

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is not derided as being a negative characteristic that must be shed for the
advancement of Western civilization, as later Orientalist narratives asserted.
Egyptian artistic influence is marked as an earlier, less developed stage of art
from which the Etruscans must advance, establishing this period as the time in
which the West learns from the East but then surpasses it. Such a conception
is necessarily Orientalist in its framing, even if it does not contain the explicit
negativity that later descriptions will include.
Christian Gottlob Heyne wrote a number of works between 1773 and
1775 devoted to Etruscan art, one of which provided a systematic description of Etruscan art. Heyne expanded upon the categorization of Caylus and
Winckelmann, whose work was published shortly before, by describing five
phases of Etruscan art, the third period of which was devoted to influences
from the Phoenicians and Egyptians, visible in similarities in statue forms.20 In
doing so, Heyne laid the groundwork for a distinct period of eastern influences
within Etruscan art. Heyne stated the eastern influence was the result of commerce between coastal Etruscan cities and the Phoenicians, as well as Etruscan
sailors venturing to Egypt, a categorization of these interactions that aligns
more closely with Caylus than Winckelmann.21 Colonization or the placement
of emporia by Eastern peoples was not believed to be necessary for artistic
and cultural influence to take place. Heyne described the results of this influence as not only the transfer of artistic style through Etruscan copying and
assimilation of the human form but also as the transmission of larger customs
and ritual.22 Etruscan attraction to Egyptian forms and Phoenician arts was
because of the newness of these images and ideas not an inherent belief that
this style of art was necessarily superior, a value judgment often attributed to
figural representation.23 The changes in artistic practice and larger cultural
effects were not thought to be long lasting by Heyne, who believed that the
Etruscans gradually began to return to their own nature and original customs
following this Eastern influence. In attributing larger changes in cultural practices, Heyne presaged the broader societal implications at the heart of the process of ‘orientalization’ defined much later.
Both Heyne and Caylus envisioned eastern artistic and cultural influence
as being the result of commercial activity rather than colonization, but Heyne
is unique in setting this period of influence aside as a distinct period within
Etruscan art. The ‘orientalizing’ period will not be established until more
20
21
22
23

Heyne 1773.
Heyne 1773, 39–40.
Heyne 1774, 68.
Heyne 1773, 39–40.

Etruscan Orientalization

13

than a century later, but distinguishing artistic chronologies based on cultural influence will be an important formulation in later histories. Heyne lacks
the Orientalist perspective that Winckelmann takes for describing Egyptian
art, which may be due to the fact that Heyne appears to be more willing to
acknowledge a transfer of useful knowledge from East to West.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann explicitly ties the history of art and the
development of civilization together in the preface of his Geschichte der
Kunst des Alterthums, published in 1764.24 Winckelmann fashioned his history of art in the same way he approached the artistic development of each
civilization with a discussion of their origins, rise, peak, and decline.25 The five
books of the history considered: (1) Origin of Art, (2) Art among the Egyptians,
Phoenicians and Persians, (3) Etruscan Art, (4) Greek Art, (5) Roman Art. Each
of these books progressively led to the peak of artistic development, which
Winckelmann believed was achieved in Greek art. Because Winckelmann’s
interpretation of artistic development attempted to stretch beyond a simple
catalogue of works to use geography, environment, and government as explanatory tools for artistic change, modern judgements about the strengths and
weaknesses of each cultural group were woven into his history. Within these
assessments, the interpretive frameworks of Orientalism and colonialism can
be observed as underlying influences in his work.26 Winckelmann’s profound
effect on art history has meant that many of the biases that Orientalism and
colonialism instilled in his work have become enshrined in later understandings of the ‘orientalizing’ and ‘orientalization’ phenomenon.
In later understandings of the ‘orientalizing’ period, this phase is seen as
ushering in the beginnings of art within the West. Notably, Winckelmann did
not believe that art began within a single country to be diffused outward but
rather that art began in the same way in all nations.27 Such a framing negated
the need for creating an ‘orientalizing’ period to serve as the transition from
a ‘primitive’ Geometric period to a true figural art form. Instead of artistic
practice being invented and then transported between nations, Winckelmann
24
25
26

27

Winckelmann 1873, 150.
For more on the intellectual milieu and underpinnings of Winckelmann’s work, see
Harloe 2013.
Racism underlies all these interpretative frameworks, and there have been a number of
scholars who have investigated Winckelmann’s racial thought (Bernal 1987; Bindman
2002; Hodne 2020a, 2020b) and traced the influences of Winckelmann on later European
racial thought (Mosse 1995). Since racialized categories are fundamental to Orientalist,
colonialist, and nationalist ideologies, it would be useful to examine the racial understandings of all authors considered here, but that is beyond the scope of this particular work.
Winckelmann 1873, 193.

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attributed chronological differences in the development of art to geographic
and cultural differences in each place. To Winckelmann, art flourished more
quickly in Egypt because its people were centralized along the Nile River and
therefore were more easily united.28 Winckelmann did not believe that this
early artistic knowledge spread outward from Egypt because foreigners were
not allowed into Egypt until the time of Psammetichus in the seventh century.29
There is no mention of the possibility that the Egyptians might have traveled
themselves, engaging in foreign trading missions. Rather, any potential Eastern
influence is attributed to the Phoenicians, who were engaged in trade with the
Greeks and who were allies of the Etruscans.
Winckelmann clearly struggled with how best to explain the similarities
in artistic styles observed between Egypt, Greece, and Etruria. He discounted
the possibility that Egyptian art had any lasting influence on either Greece or
Etruria. The idea that Greece derived its art from Egypt was quickly dismissed
even while acknowledging that a few ancient Greek authors state this as fact.30
As proof Winckelmann uses a single example of the differential placement
of inscriptions on statues between Egypt and Greece.31 The possibility that
Etruscan art was influenced by Egypt is given more credence and grudgingly
acknowledged through a telling metaphor of a beetle in horse dung:
If, for example, any one should see a scarab cut on obelisks, or engraved
on the convex side of Egyptian and Etruscan gems, he might consequently
infer that the Etruscans had borrowed the emblem from the Egyptians,
thereby rendering it probable that they had likewise derived their art from
the same source. Certainly it must appear strange to us, that an insect so
vile should have become a sacred symbol with the one, and apparently
with the other nation also;…. As Pamphus, one of the earliest poets, hides
his Jupiter in the dung of a horse, we might interpret the idea of an image
of the presence of a divinity in all things, even the meanest; but it seems
to me that this low metaphor may, perchance, be drawn precisely from
the scarab, which rakes over, and lives in, horse dung. But that I may not
enter into any further analysis of this unpleasant image, I am willing to
acknowledge that the Etruscans received it from the Egyptians.32

28
29
30
31
32

Winckelmann 1873, 194.
Winckelmann 1873, 199.
Winckelmann 1873, 203; Winckelmann does not state the names of these authors.
Winckelmann 1873, 203.
Winckelmann 1873, 202.

Etruscan Orientalization

15

This interpretation of how Pamphus received the idea of hiding Jupiter in
dung is embedded within a larger passage that considers the source of Etruscan
art. Because these engraved scarabs are found in both Egypt and Etruria,
Winckelmann was willing to accept that the Etruscans may have in fact been
influenced by the Egyptians, replicating their artistic works through drawing.
Through this metaphor, Egyptian artistic practice becomes the scarab encased
in dung, something lowly, vile, and mean. Presumably Winckelmann imagined
that the Etruscans had to first wash off this Egyptian influence before using
it themselves.
Orientalist conceptions of peoples, their art, government, and their perceived differences from Western peoples are prominent throughout the work
but are especially prevalent within the book considering Egyptian, Phoenician,
and Persian art as a whole. By combining the art of three civilizations within
a single book, Winckelmann shows a systematic grouping of Eastern peoples
that diminishes their achievements in artistic development by comparison
to the other groups discussed.33 This kind of undifferentiated grouping will
later become preserved in the geographically obscuring term of ‘orientalizing’ art. Winckelmann was able to group all of these eastern peoples into a
single book because he believed that each group achieved no further artistic
development, but instead their art remained stagnant.34 There were only two
periods of artistic style for the Egyptians: one that encompassed the time in
which Egypt was ruled by kings and another that was characterized by Greek
rule after Alexander’s conquest, a governmental change that resulted in a new
phase of Egyptian art due to Greek influence. Winckelmann attributed the lack
of artistic development within Egypt, Phoenicia, and Persia to the presence of
monarchy, which stifled artistic innovation because no honors or privileges
were granted to those artists who demonstrated individual talent.35 Instead,
art was more connected with religion, superstitio (superstition), and conformity than the artistic schools and individual achievement seen in later Greece.
Such generalizations of Eastern governing structures as strict and despotic and
religious institutions as grounded in superstition rather than sincere religious
belief are cornerstones of Orientalist perceptions of the East, both in antiquity
and in more modern history.
33
34

35

Winckelmann admits that Egyptian art alone has many more examples to catalogue than
Etruscan art, to which a singular book is devoted.
He argued Egypt does go through a period of decline, but this occurs later in its history
until Winckelmann’s own time, where he describes the modern inhabitants of Egypt
as “living without labor, sleeping in sloth” and having a “tendency toward corpulence”
(Winckelmann 1873, 229).
Winckelmann 1873, 316–17.

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Winckelmann conceived of Egyptian art as fundamentally different than
the European art of Etruria and Greece. He characterized Egyptian art as a tree
with strong roots whose growth becomes stifled by worms while Etruria and
Greece are presented as rivers, entities that by their very nature have a path
and progression.36 Winckelmann connected these essential artistic differences
with geographic and climatic variations, which affected not only the peoples
themselves, but also the types of art that they created. Winckelmann ascribed
the production of fantastical figures that combined creatures of totally different natures, a prominent figural representation of the ‘orientalizing’ period, to
hot and warm climates, such as in Egypt and Persia.37 Such art would be considered completely foreign to peoples from temperate climates (Greeks, Italians,
and Phoenicians), who were more accustomed to producing picturesque and
naturalistic images. For Winckelmann, geography created fundamental differences in figural representation, providing justification for a dismissal of these
mythical creatures as the product of a cultural defect.
This negative, Orientalist view of an Eastern artistic style is contrasted with
the superior impression given of Greek art. Winckelmann’s idealism of Greek
art is certainly well known,38 but our interest lies in how Winckelmann envisioned Greek influence on Etruscan art and how he believed this influence
was exerted.39 For Winckelmann, Etruscan history began with a colonization
movement of Pelasgians from Arcadia in Greece to the Etruscan homeland
in Italy well before the beginnings of Etruscan art.40 This initial colonization
was bookended by a later colonization of Greeks 300 years after Homer but
300 years before Herodotus, which Winckelmann believed could be proved by
the presence of coins with Greek letters at the site of Falerii.41 Winckelmann
saw this colonization as critical to the second style of Etruscan art, which
was driven toward the peak of artistic achievement through interaction with
the Greeks, whose mythology became a prevalent theme of Etruscan art.
Colonialism, therefore, was the driver of artistic and civilizational change and
progress. This style of naturalistic art seen in the Stosch gem and sepulchral
urns of what would become the Classical period was thought by Winckelmann
to have flourished at an earlier period within Etruria than Greece because
he believed that Etruria had a democratic form of government that involved
36
37
38
39
40
41

Winckelmann 1873, 191–92.
Winckelmann 1873, 235.
Potts 2000.
For a greater discussion of the influence of Winckelmann’s framing of Greek and Etruscan
art, see Izzet 2007a.
Winckelmann 1873, 324.
Winckelmann 1873, 326.

Etruscan Orientalization

17

individual participation while Greece was dealing with numerous rebellions.42
The misattribution of a democracy within Etruria, contrary to literary evidence, seems necessary for Winckelmann’s overall argument that the type of
government present within a country had a direct effect on the style and level
of artistic development that could be achieved. Such a correlation between
government type and artistic development was also used by Winckelmann to
explain the decline of Etruscan art, which began after Roman conquest. By
linking art with larger political phenomena, Winckelmann raised the historical
implications and ramifications of creating histories of art and classifying artistic periods. Winckelmann’s attitudes toward forms of government and modern
colonization during his own time informed the way in which he conceived of
positive artistic and civilizational change within the past.
Although Winckelmann did not create a distinct period of eastern influence on Greece and Etruria within his history of art, he did establish many of
the themes at the heart of the ‘orientalizing’ period. The equation of artistic
development with civilizational development is critical for the broader connotations implied by interpretations of ‘orientalizing’ art as part of a suite of
cultural changes. The cultural change attributed to colonization is seen as long
lasting and substantial while artistic influence achieved through any other
means is thought to be only temporary. Eastern civilizations such as Egypt,
Persia, and Phoenicia are seen as groups frozen in cultural-historical time,
unable to develop artistically and culturally beyond the origins of art because
monarchy and other elements intrinsic to their “Easterness” prevented it. Each
of these attributes carries forward in more explicit terms in definitions of ‘orientalization’ developed much later by Massimo Pallottino.
The seeds of later interpretations of the ‘orientalizing’ period and ‘orientalization’ can be traced to each of these early Western art historical narratives.
All see art as a product of a larger culture and, therefore, a material medium
for understanding ancient cultures beyond the written record. Because of this,
tracing the development of art toward naturalism and idealism, ideas that
were aesthetically more valued in the West, was seen as a way to determine
the position of a culture in the evolution of civilizations.43 For each author, the
earliest artistic development can be observed in Egypt. For Winckelmann, art
42
43

Winckelmann 1873, 330.
Ascribing the development of naturalism and idealism within art to the passage of civilization from East to West became more difficult when new discoveries began to come out
of Assyria in the mid-nineteenth century showing both of these traits within Assyrian
art. Larsen (1996, 95–96 and 102) describes the ways in which Assyrian art was lauded by
Layard for its ability to depict lions as true-to-life while at the same time considering it
inferior to works from Greece and Rome and with no intrinsic value for its beauty.

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was independently developed in every culture but reaches its peak at different
times (if at all), while Heyne and Caylus clearly envisioned a transmission of
these artistic skills from their earliest roots in Egypt to Greece and Etruria, and
eventually to Rome. In this process, all authors picture Egyptian art as something that must be surpassed by Western countries, leaving the East in a period
of stagnation where Eastern peoples and their art could no longer develop.
Although Heyne was the only one to categorize this eastern influence within
a distinct period, all envisioned the encounter between Eastern art and both
Greece and Etruria as fundamental for the later development of naturalism
and the ideal form in Western art. From this perspective, this period of Eastern
influence had already become formulated as ‘orientalizing,’ although such a
term had not yet been coined.
3

Etruscan Origins and Nationalism

Even as these grand art historical narratives were being constructed, there
was a more foundational question being debated in Etruscan historiography:
what was the true origin of the Etruscans and their civilization? The debate
on Etruscan origins was part of a larger discussion whose goal was to outline
the origin, development, and culmination of the concept of civilization within
Europe. Although Greece and Rome represented foundational cultures for the
civilizations of the West, there was a push to identify the first European civilization after the Great Deluge of the Bible and Greek mythology that destroyed
the earliest civilizations. Because this quest stretched beyond the realm of
recorded consensus from written sources, the question was considered open to
debate. The nationalist movements that began in the late eighteenth century
connected the question of European civilization’s origin to individual national
histories and identities.44 Starting with the French Revolution at the end of
the eighteenth century, several political movements began throughout Europe
that opposed the large multi-ethnic empires or small isolated kingdoms of
old in favor of nation-states that were built on economic, social, and cultural
unity. In order to build legitimacy, these new nation-states looked to the past
for historically based precedents of their own identity, seeking a framework
which was not based on the divinely sanctioned legitimacy of ruling kings and
emperors. Interest focused on the pre-Roman indigenous peoples of Europe,
44

For a greater exploration of nationalism’s influence on the development of archaeology
and the exploration of origins in Europe, see Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Díaz-Andreu García
and Champion 1996; Meskell 2005; Díaz-Andreu García 2007.

Etruscan Orientalization

19

who could serve as the historical forebearers of these new modern nations, as
distinct peoples established before the arrival of over-arching Roman rule. In
addition to employing these pre-Roman groups as the originators of modern
nation states, debate occurred between European nations over whose civilization developed first and could, therefore, be seen as the originator of civilization for all.
In Italy, the Etruscans became the pre-Roman group identified as the first
civilization on the peninsula, whose culture could serve as an example for
nationalist Italian unity.45 The Etruscans were put forward in part because
the rise of nationalist origin stories came to prominence just as the phenomenon of Etruscheria was winding down at the end of the eighteenth century.
Etruscheria, a cultural fascination with the Etruscans set off by the publication
of Thomas Dempster’s De Etruria regali in 1723,46 established the Etruscans as
a full-fledged civilization before the birth of Rome who could be looked to as
the earliest civilization on the Italian peninsula.47 However, since there had
been a lack of consensus on the origin of the Etruscans from antiquity, the
debate shifted from finding the first civilization in Italy to determining the
origin of the Etruscans. This problem garnered international attention with
conflicting opinions from among the Italian and Northern European scholarly
communities.48 This debate was not simply a dispute over where the Etruscans,
and through them the earliest advanced civilization in Italy, came from but
rather where Western civilization originated in Europe.
3.1
Ancient Debates on Etruscan Origins
At the center of the modern debate were ancient theories on Etruscan origins, which put forth three explanations:49 (1) Dionysius of Halicarnassus
asserted that the Etruscans were autochthonous, native peoples of Italy;50
(2) Herodotus, along with the vast majority of ancient sources, stated that
the Etruscans had migrated from Lydia to Italy;51 (3) Hellanicus of Lesbos (as
reported by Dionysius) equated the Etruscans with the ancient Pelasgians,
45
46
47
48
49
50
51

Mario Guarnacci and Gionvanni Fabbroni traced the origins of the Italic peoples back to
the Etruscans (De Francesco 2013, 39).
Dempster 1723.
At the time of Dempster’s creation of the work, Etruscan monarchy was used as a justification of the Medici monarchy in Tuscany (Cristofani 1978b, 1983; Leighton and Castelino
1990; Bartoloni 2012, 24–28; De Angelis 2013; Ulf 2017; Loriga 2019).
Bellelli 2012; De Francesco 2013; Ulf 2017; Loriga 2019.
Briquel (2000, 2013) provides an in-depth summation of each of these ancient theories.
Dion. Hal., Ant. Rom. 1.26–30.
Hdt. Hist. 1.94.2–7 for the Lydian thesis. Briquel 1990, 479 for the other Latin authors who
allude to this Lydian origin.

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who lived in Greece before the Hellenes expelled them to Italy.52 Each ancient
theory put forward should be understood within the larger framework of the
work and in light of the intent of the author who provided it. Dionysius meticulously laid out each reported theory in an almost scientific exploration of the
question, refuting all alternatives to autochthony. For Dionysius, the Etruscans
needed to be indigenous ‘barbarians’ of Italy rather than a group from the
eastern Mediterranean with cultural links to Greece. Dionysius positioned the
Romans as the only true Greeks within the Italian peninsula, whose Trojan
descent made them Greeks in Dionysius’ eyes. His argument touted the origin
of the Romans by deprecating the Etruscans to reassure his fellow Greeks that
they had been conquered by the only Greek population from Italy rather than
by ‘barbarians.’53 The conclusion that the Etruscans were indigenous was the
necessary culmination of a literary work meant to justify Roman rule of Greece
rather than the result of scientific deduction.
The remaining ancient origin theories for the Etruscans have been described
by Dominique Briquel as examples of syngeneia, where two groups who have a
good diplomatic relationship present such cooperation as one rooted in ancestral linkages between the two groups.54 The Pelasgian origin story provides an
example of connections asserted between Etruria and Thessaly during the fifth
century when recorded by Hellanicus of Lesbos. This theory, directly quoted
by Dionysius, asserts that the Etruscans were ancient Pelasgians who lived in
Thessaly for five generations before being driven out by Hellen, the eponymous ancestor of all Greeks. The Pelasgians sailed first to Spina on the Adriatic
coast before going west across the Apennines to Cortona to conquer the peoples in the land known as Tyrrhenia, later adopting this name for themselves.
This origin story characterizes the Etruscans as semi-Greek, creating ancestral
connections between Etruscan cities and Greek regions that were engaged in
trade and other diplomatic relationships at the time in which the story was
reported. This theory dates the Pelasgians/Etruscans to before the Greeks and
was an integral part of modern interpretations in the quest of cultural primacy,
explored shortly.
The theory of Lydian origins was mentioned by Herodotus in reference
to the origin of the Lydian and Greek games as an aside in a longer discussion on Lydian customs, which were said to have begun at the same time
that the Lydians colonized Etruria. Although Tacitus reports much later that
the Etruscans had adopted the origin story reported by Herodotus as their
52
53
54

Hellanicus of Lesbos, Phoronis, quoted verbatim in Dion. Hal., Ant.Rom. 1.28.3.
Briquel 2013, 40–41.
Briquel 2013, 44.

Etruscan Orientalization

21

own,55 Herodotus relays this colonization narrative as a Lydian rather than
an Etruscan story about their own history. Since the Lydian tale is structured
in the manner of Greek narratives of colonization from the time, it may have
been created to assert a similar cooperative and colonial relationship between
Lydia and Etruria. The theories reported by both Hellanicus and Herodotus
were designed to suit the broader intent of strengthening cultural bonds rather
than to provide a history of Etruscan origins that was determined based on the
best available evidence.
Interpretations of Etruscan Origins in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries
Just as these ancient origin narratives were affected by an overall authorial purpose, modern interpretations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
were shaped by broader movements of nationalism. The variety of Etruscan
origin stories provided by ancient authors meant that modern nationalist
histories could draw on whichever origin best suited their own modern aims.
Along with the theories put forward by ancient authors, a fourth theory based
on modern linguistic studies was added: the Etruscans were originally from
a Rhaetian tribe that descended into the Italian peninsula from north of the
Alps in military conquest. This thesis was originally put forward by Frenchman
Nicolas Fréret in 1753 and later gained the following of Danish-German scholar
B.G. Niebuhr and the Germans Theodore Mommsen and K.O. Müller.56 This
origin story, unlike those derived from literary sources, was based on the linguistic similarities with Rhaetic, a language attested through inscriptions
related to Etruscan that belonged to tribes located in the Alps of Switzerland
and that had few linguistic similarities with any other nearby languages. The
connection with the Rhaetians was made on the basis of inscriptions and linguistics, a hallmark of German philology and scholarship of this time, and was
further bolstered by the discovery of the Bronze Age Terramare culture later in
the nineteenth century.57 The methods employed to form this origin story were
a strong reaction against the pseudo-scientific practices of eighteenth-century
Etruscheria, but this new, more scientific approach harbored its own ideological motivations. The concentration of northern European scholars in support
of a theory that placed the origins of the first ‘civilized’ people of Italy within
central Europe shows the tendency of these debates to form ideological camps
around nationalistic interests.
3.2

55
56
57

Tac. Ann. 4.55.
Momigliano 1994, 309; De Francesco 2013, 77; Briquel 2013, 36.
Pallottino 1974, 67.

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Within Italian scholarship, debate in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
century focused on the theories of Etruscan origins that were proposed by
ancient authors. The founder of Etruscology as a specialized historical realm
of study, Luigi Lanzi, moved the study of the Etruscans toward analytical models and away from the antiquarianism of Etruscheria, building a historical
narrative for Etruscan art through the incorporation of monuments and deciphering major elements of the Etruscan language by examining epigraphic
sources.58 Lanzi agreed with Herodotus’ idea that the Etruscans were Lydian
in origin.59 This Lydian origin did not mean that Lanzi believed the origins of
civilization began in the East and traveled to Italy via the Etruscans. Lanzi’s tripartite outline of the development of Etruscan art stated that its first and earliest period within Italy, which was characterized as the most truly Etruscan,
was primitive and not yet developed enough to be a marker of civilization.60
In this period, Etruscan art shared more similarities with the characteristics
of Egyptian art. Lanzi specifically pushed back against the argument made by
Caylus and Antonio Gori that Etruscan art derived from Egyptian art by stating
that the similarity in forms is simply due to similarities across nature not direct
influence.61 The primary catalyst for artistic development within Etruria, following Winckelmann, was the arrival of the Greeks, who brought with them
the alphabet, religion, mythology, iconography, and institutions.62 For Lanzi,
the origins of the Etruscans were less important because the Etruscans were
not thought to have brought the first instance of civilization with them from
the East. The roots of civilization were to be found in Greece. Such a stand put
him and his students in direct conflict with many of his fellow Italians who
believed in Etruscan autochthony and primacy.
In a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Italy that was struggling
against French occupation and striving to build sentiment for a unified Italian
peninsula, a number of Italian intellectuals looked to establish the Etruscans
as the very first civilization and as a group which had united the entire Italian
peninsula. In such a framework, autochthony for the Etruscans was seen as
necessary for Italian pride, self-rule, and eventually nationalist unification.
This modern political consideration influenced a strand of Italian intellectuals who argued for an autochthonous origin for the Etruscans, either based
on Dionysius or through a modification of Hellanicus’ argument that placed
58
59
60
61
62

Pallottino 1961; Devoto 1961; Rossi 2006; Desideri 2009; Bartoloni 2012, 27–32; Riva 2018.
Lanzi 1824a, 18–19; De Francesco 2013, 71.
Pallottino 1961, xxxii; Riva 2018, 12.
Lanzi 1824b, 145, 187, 494; Pallottino 1961, xxxi.
Pasqui and Lanzi 1907.

Etruscan Orientalization

23

the Pelasgians as originally from Etruria. All these theories built on the work
of Mario Guarnacci, who asserted that all Italics on the Italian peninsula had
originally derived from the Etruscans.63 In light of French claims of Druidic
civilizational primacy64 and German scholars locating Etruscan origins within
their own territory, Italian counter arguments to these positions took on
nationalist sentiment.
One Italian writer who specifically sought to push back against the beliefs of
Druidic and therefore French primacy was Vincenzo Cuoco. His novel Platone
in Italia, published in multiple volumes in 1804 and 1806, provided the historical precedent of a united Italy during the time of the Etruscans, whose
cultural traditions served as the origin of European civilization.65 The novel
followed Plato and a young Athenian named Cleobolus on a journey through
the ancient cities of southern Italy, locales familiar to Cuoco, who was a native
of Molise. The civilization at the center of this narrative was the Etruscan,
which Cuoco argued had united all of Italy at a time well before the Trojan
War. In this account, Cuoco’s ancient guides through the south considered
the level of civilization reached in Italy to be far superior to that of Greece
and viewed the Pythagorean school that they visited to be the center of Italian
politics and morals.66 A confusion of chronology led Cuoco to believe that this
already-established Etruscan empire had unified Italy before then going on to
colonize Greece, where they were called Pelasgians. The Etruscans, therefore,
had spread their own knowledge and civilization to Greece, not the reverse.
Eventually, these very same Pelasgians founded the Greek colonies in Magna
Graecia as a return to the Italian peninsula by an originally Etruscan group,
showing that the regional differences believed to be so important within modern Italy should not be considered a historical fact. In his work Cuoco sought
to place the Etruscans and their united Italian peninsula as the oldest civilization within Europe while also establishing the cultural superiority of Italy
to Greece, making his work an important influence in the Risorgimento.67
63
64

65
66
67

De Francesco 2013, 39; 47–49.
In France, for example, this was called Celtomania, and centered on basing the modern
nation state on the tribe of Celts rather than the Franks, who had come to represent the
noble aristocracy. Along with serving as the ancient basis for modern France, many French
scholars sought to assert the Celts as the first and the greatest people and civilization of
Europe. La Tour d’Auvergne (1792) stated that Celtic was the original human language,
Johanneau (1807) claimed that all European peoples had descended from the Celts, and
Maréchal (1799) believed that Pythagoras had received his wisdom while spending time
with the Druids in Paris (Dietler 1994; De Francesco 2013).
Cuoco 1804.
De Francesco 2013, 36.
Cesarani 2010; De Francesco 2013, 34–45.

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This Italian claim to civilization’s origins and the directionality of civilization
outward from Italy went against French claims to a Druidic origin of civilization and Orientalist arguments that civilization originated in the East, in countries such as Egypt and Ethiopia, and later traveled westward.68
Angelo Mazzoldi took this reversal of civilizational flow further to extend
the Etruscan or Pelasgian influence to Egypt and Phoenicia.69 Although he
does not explicitly cite Cuoco, Mazzoldi makes reference to Guarnacci’s thesis
of a united Etruscan Italian peninsula.70 His 1840 work asserted an autochthonous origin for the Etruscans, stating that they were called the ancient
Pelasgians by the Greeks and that these Pelasgians had an empire that encompassed the entire Italian peninsula.71 Such a historic precedent of a united
Italian peninsula made modern unification a possibility for those in support
of Italian nationalism. According to Mazzoldi, this historic period of unification was one in which the Pelasgians helped to bring civilization to the known
world. Following the destruction of Atlantis, which according to Plato ruled the
Pelasgian kingdom, the Pelasgians exported their civilization and institutions
to Greece, Egypt, and Phoenicia.72 Such a construction reversed the historical
tradition of civilization moving gradually from East to West, instead placing
Italy as the first civilization. This kind of ‘occidentalization’ flew in the face
of prevailing wisdom and was criticized by Bianchi-Giovini for being ignorant
of both the Etruscan evidence and the new research that was emerging out of
the eastern Mediterranean.73 Although Mazzoldi’s Pelasgian hypothesis drew
many critiques, its many reprints show that this work gained popularity at the
time. This is likely because it not only provided historic precedent of nationalist unification but also showed that during a period of such unity Italy served
as a beacon that exported civilization throughout the world.
This debate on the initial origins of civilization and the directionality of its
dispersal is clearly demonstrated in the writings of Giuseppe Micali, whose
books and letters show a change of opinion based on the emergence of new
archaeological evidence over time. Beginning with his publication of Italia
avanti il dominio dei romani in 1810, Micali explored the nature of Italy and its
diverse peoples before the onset and control of the Roman Empire. In the first
68
69
70
71
72
73

Dupuis 1801.
Mazzoldi 1840.
Mazzoldi 1840, 8.
Mazzoldi 1840, 175–76; De Francesco 2013, 88.
Mazzoldi 1840, 207.
De Francesco 2013, 91 citing Bianchi-Giovini 1842, 83–84. Mazzoldi 1846, 14 asserts
the validity of his arguments by stating that they are based on the words of ancient
authors alone.

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25

sentence of the book, he alludes to the debate on Etruscan origins, decrying
the fact that scholars have looked to Egypt, Greece, Asia, and the North for
traces of Italian ancestors but have not thought to look within Italy itself.74 In
attempting to come to a better understanding of the pre-Roman peoples of
Italy, Micali contended for the autochthonous nature of each of these groups,
not just the Etruscans, as well as their common cultural heritage. He believed
that the autochthonous peoples of Italy were independent, differentiated
groups who were unified by a common cultural model while being loosely,
non-hierarchically organized.75 This picture of early Italy envisioned a system
of loosely federated states, coexisting in harmony and united as a single civilization: in other words, an ideal example for those who sought to unify Italy
during the Risorgimento. In this model, people throughout the peninsula were
not required to give up their regional traditions for the sake of Italian nationalism since a specifically Italian civilization had existed once in the past and
had achieved unity while maintaining a certain amount of regional autonomy.
Micali asserted this history and regional autonomy in a number of different
works throughout the early nineteenth century, making his scholarship a centerpiece of intellectual thought for the Risorgimento.76
The employment of Micali’s work within nationalist projects imbued the
autochthonous position on Etruscan origins with political implications for the
modern Italian state. The importance of its modern political influence threatened its scholarly position as an unbiased assessment of Etruscan origins.
The assertion of autochthony carried with it an implication of the primacy
and superiority of Italian culture; yet as more and more evidence of earlier,
advanced civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean came to light, maintaining such a position for Italy as the origin of European and Mediterranean civilization became increasingly difficult. We can see evidence of the difficulties
behind such claims to autochthony in the evolution of Micali’s writing from the
beginning to the end of his career. In a letter to his friend Melchiorre Delfico
written in 1790, Micali voiced his opposition to the other prominent theories
of Italian origins asserted by the Germanic, French, and Orientalist academic
traditions, as well as some within Etruscology at the time:
ma io non mi persuaderò mai che un insurrezione di Germani o di Celti,
o come altri vogliono una colonia di lidi, di fenici, di egizi, abbian come
74
75
76

Micali 1810.
De Francesco 2013, 65.
De Francesco (2013, chaps. 2 and 3) offers a full consideration of Micali’s influence and
reception.

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per miracolo popolata l’Italia, parendomi assai più conforme alla natura
e alla ragione, che in un paese ove il fisico e il morale hanno avuto in ogni
tempo uno sviluppo tanto maraviglioso, sia da secoli remotissimi esistito un popolo indigeno, che per naturale industria abbia saputo inalzarsi
successivamente a un grado di coltura e di sapere sorprendente.
I will never be persuaded that an insurrection of Germanic tribes or Celts
or, as others would have it, a colony of Lydians, Phoenicians, or Egyptians
had, as if by a miracle, populated Italy. It appears to me far more in conformity with nature and reason that, in a country where there has been
such marvelous physical and moral development in every period, there
existed in the remote past an indigenous people, who by their own natural industry were able to elevate themselves to an astonishing degree of
culture and knowledge.77
His opinion changed, however, as more archaeological materials were found
in Etruria, and as England, France, and Germany conducted more archaeological explorations in the Near East. While he continued to hold the position
of autochthony for the Etruscans and other Italic peoples, the beginnings of
civilization were to be found outside of the Italian peninsula. In his final edition of Monumenti inediti a illustrazione della storia degli antichi popoli italiani
published in 1844, Micali conceded that the first civilizations began in the East
and were subsequently transferred to the West:
Se però la profonda sapienza antica venne comunicata da prima
all’Occidente dalla regione onde nasce il sole, fu indigena la nazionalità
delle italiche genti, come fu opera dei nostri savi l’ordito d’un sistema di
ben ordinata instituzione civile,… Stavasi la gran forza della instituzione
etrusca nella fermezza degli ordini politici, e nella tenacità della legge;
ma, se mantenevasi con rigore la forma, trionfavano coll’andar del tempo
nuovi bisogni, nuove voglie, e nuovi costumi.
If, however, profound ancient knowledge was first communicated to the
West from the region where the sun rises, the nationality of the Italic peoples was indigenous, as it was the work of our wisdom to weave a system
of well-organised civil instruction…. The great strength of the Etruscan
institution was in the firmness of political order and in the tenacity of
77

De Francesco 2013, 57 translation of Delfico 1904, vol. 4 172–73.

Etruscan Orientalization

27

the law; but if they maintained the form with rigour, then as time drew on
new needs, new desires and new customs were triumphant.78
Here, Micali continues to assert his opinion of the inherent superiority of
the Italians, but now had to allow that not all of Italy’s strengths were of her
own making. In order to keep the Italian peoples indigenous to the peninsula,
he needed to detach genealogical descent from the transfer of knowledge
and imply a process of cultural transmission that for the most part was left
undefined. Such a change in the 1844 edition, after 30 years of writing on the
topic of Italian origins, was not a coincidence. The publication of the French
Napoleonic expedition to Egypt between 1809 and 1828 provided hundreds of
drawings of Egyptian objects and monuments for the scholarly community
and ignited Egyptomania throughout Europe.79 When the Regolini-Galassi
tomb was then found in Cerveteri in 1836, and its elaborate finds – such as the
golden fibulae, bowls and pectoral – could be compared with the recently published material from Egypt, it must have been difficult for Micali to continue to
deny links between Italy and Egypt.80
In Micali’s description of this East–West connection and the transfer of
civilization, we see the infusion of Orientalist language. By stating that in the
passage of ancient knowledge from the East, such cultural forms needed to
be organized within “institutions,” “law,” and “rigour,” we see the way in which
Micali and others felt the East had to be forced to become Western. Civilization
in its original form arrived with imperfections associated with Orientalist stereotypes of the East, such as despotism and lax or unrestrained behavior. Such
imperfections had to be both removed and corrected within the transferal
processes to make civilization “Western.” This infusion of Orientalism into the
description of the transfer of objects, knowledge, and ideas began a trend that
stretched beyond the conceptualization of Italy’s origins and into the study of
art history, becoming ingrained within the language used to describe ‘orientalizing’ material.
It is important to note that this imposition of Orientalism only began as
discoveries became integrated into large historical and art historical works.
When such finds were first made, their publication was typically characterized
by descriptive texts concerning only what was visible on the object itself and
the manufacturing technique used to create it with little to no interpretative
78
79
80

De Francesco 2013, 78 translation of Micali 1844, iv–v.
Description de l’Égypte 1809–1828; Curl 1994.
Objects from the Regolini-Galassi tomb appear in the plates of Micali’s 1844 edition
(Micali 1844, Tav XLV and XLVI).

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framework. This method of archaeological publication fell into the techniques established by the nineteenth-century approach to archaeology, heavily influenced by the German tradition at the time. An example of this in the
Etruscan context can be seen in the initial publications of material from the
Regolini-Galassi tomb, found in 1836 by archpriest Alessandro Regolini and general Vincenzo Galassi outside of Cerveteri, and eventually housed within the
Gregorian Etruscan Museum within the Vatican. The 1842 publication of this
museum had an entire section dedicated to the finds of the Regolini-Galassi
tomb, comprising over thirty plates accompanied by short textual descriptions
of the objects illustrated. The accounts were short, direct, and entirely concerned with relating the form of the object, how it was made, and the precise
nature of the figures represented on any objects with iconography.81 Even the
descriptions of figures, such as sphinxes, chimeras, harpies, and griffins, as well
as foreign animals such as lions, simply identified these figures, using no adjectives to further color the reader’s interpretation of these scenes.
Such a description stands in strong contrast to subsequent adjectives
applied to these materials such as foreign, grotesque, or monstrous, Orientalist
terms that came to be assigned when objects similar to those found in the
Regolini-Galassi tomb were specifically identified as imports from the East.82
Before they were recognized as imports from the eastern Mediterranean and
before they were forced into a broader art historical narrative, these objects
were simply described as being true to scale, escaping the Orientalism already
present in many of the general histories of art. However, once published, the
iconography could be compared to the art of Egypt from Napoleon’s expedition and later, direct comparanda could be found for the Phoenician bowl of
the Regolini-Galassi tomb in Austen Henry Layard’s discovery of similar metal
bowls at Nineveh (1853) and in Cesnola’s metal bowls from Cyprus (1877).83 At
their initial discovery, the material from the Regolini-Galassi tomb could not
be safely fit into an eastern origin and so were not automatically categorized
as being exotic depictions of monstrous beings, in case they were not originally from the Orient. As this recognition of an eastern origin became clearer,
Orientalist language, such as that presented by Micali, became infused in art
historical and historical narratives.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, as proponents of European nationalism played a great role in shaping the intellectual milieu by working to
81
82
83

Maximis 1842.
See works by Harrison (1885), Collignon and Wright (1886), and Martha (1889), which are
discussed further below.
Layard 1853; Cesnola 1877.

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29

employ antiquity for their own ends, the stage was set for the birth of a formal term to describe the way in which knowledge was transferred from East
to West. There was a shift from nationalistic claims of primacy to an emphasis
on precisely defining the relationship in antiquity between each newly formed
modern European ‘nation’ and the Orient, which was in the process of being
explored and understood by Europeans. This formalized self-definition of
Europe based on a distance from and a superiority to the Eastern Other is at
the heart of Said’s definition of Orientalism, a phenomenon he was particularly interested in tracing during the same historical period as this increased
interest in the pre-Roman indigenous peoples of Europe.84 While Western
peoples could still be considered autochthonous, they could no longer be
hailed as the originators of the understood indices of civilization. Scholars
thus had to establish a relationship between East and West that explained not
only how civilization traveled to the West but also how it was improved in the
process, thereby affirming the West’s supremacy. In other words, for European
scholars the question became: how did civilization shed its Oriental flaws and
provide the strong moral, political, and economic foundation of Western civilization? In this regard, ancient historical sources, having served as the basis for
various origin stories, could not help to clarify the details of how civilization
transferred from East to West. Rather than looking exclusively at literary and
linguistic evidence, archaeological discoveries and art history took the lead in
trying to clarify the fraught relationship between East and West. Since Greece
was on the frontlines of this geographic bifurcation in antiquity and because
Winckelmann had attributed the height of civilization to Greek art, art historical research into the differences between East and West tended to concentrate
on Eastern elements within Greek art, with Italian materials subsumed secondarily within that.
4

Orientalizing: The Birth of a Stylistic Term

4.1
Origins in Greek Art History
Identifying the beginning of the use of ‘orientalizing’ to describe Italian and
Etruscan material is difficult because, at the time in which the term was
invented, ancient Italian art was considered a subset of Greek art and therefore inextricably intertwined within the larger realm of Greek art historical

84

Said 1978.

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historiography.85 This was because Luigi Lanzi correctly attributed black and
red-figure vases found within Etruscan tombs to a Greek origin,86 and Etruscan
and Italian art were consequently studied as a specific category under the
heading of Greek art until the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth century, when they became their own category of study. The popularity of such vases on the art market, the usefulness of their iconography in
chronological dating, and the assertion that Greek art had reached perfection
through the achievement of the idealized form meant that – while Greek art
found in Etruscan tombs was incorporated within the evolutionary history of
Greek art – Etruscan art proper was seen as something of an imperfect, tangential digression.87 The importance that Greek art history placed on vases
found in Etruria also meant that most art historical narratives built for Etruria
centered on the evolving iconography that could be observed on pottery,
often to the exclusion of other objects found within the same contexts. When
examining the historiography of Etruscan tombs dating to the so-called ‘orientalizing’ period, one must unite multiple fields of art historical study from
the nineteenth century: Greek art, Etruscan art, Egyptian art, and eventually
Phoenician art. Over the span of that century, the descriptions of and relationships between each of these art historical categories became clarified, but the
one over-arching theme that slowly shaped all interpretations of these different art forms was Orientalism and the intellectual framework it provided for
the birth of the term ‘orientalizing.’
As Etruscan art gained greater definition, imported eastern objects to Etruria
were securely identified as imports, and they quickly gained dismissive and
derisive attention. The language used, to be more directly explicated below,
illustrates a growing unease with the new evidence of the earliest civilizations
in the East and a developing need to build a historical framework that allowed
the West to receive such foreign objects from the East in both Italy and Greece.
Orientalism, however, required a historical account that accepted the positive
developments of civilization (urbanism, writing, monumental building, figural
85
86
87

Gunter (2009 chap. 2) discusses the beginning of the term ‘orientalizing’ within Greek
scholarship along with tracing the study of the relationship between Greece and the
Orient back to the time of Homer. See also Marchand 2010; Gunter 2014.
Lanzi 1806.
Bundrick (2019 chap. 1, especially pages 6–7) discusses the long-term ramifications
of interpreting the Greek black and red-figure vases found in Etruria from a primarily
Graeco-centric perspective, thereby making the Etruscan consumers a secondary concern. The book instead puts Etruscan consumers forward as active participants driving
the market of exported Greek pottery who selected the forms and figured images that
were the most appropriate to an Etruscan context.

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31

imagery, etc.) while discarding the Eastern elements, which were viewed by
nineteenth-century Europeans as the negative characteristics of an essentialized Oriental character. The nationalistic character of these nation-states was
not dependent on originality of civilization, the claim of the earliest nationalistic rhetoric discussed above, but rather on the way in which each ancient
nation encountered, fought with, tamed, and later benefited from the East.
This shift from a focus on origins to an interest in the encounter between
East and West is an intellectual transition that can be observed in the work of
Alexander Conze, the German art historian and archaeologist who coined the
term ‘orientalizing’ or orientaliserende. One of his earliest works and where the
term orientaliserende was first used, Zur Geschichte der Anfänge griechischer
Kunst, sought to locate the beginning of Greek art by identifying the earliest
artistic style found on Greek painted pottery, focusing on a single material type
for analysis as a means to extrapolate the origins of artistic practice as a whole.88
In this work, Conze sought to classify the earliest phase of Greek art by grouping
artistic works based on common decorative elements, providing characteristic
examples without naming the phase itself or assigning chronological boundaries. Citing a number of examples observed in European museums and describing their common decorative characteristics, Conze categorized the earliest
style as consisting of sharp, linear features, zigzags, concentric circles, horizontal bands, diamonds, meanders, and animals drawn primarily in outline.89 The
descriptive language used to characterize this style, which would eventually be
called Geometric, lacks biased adjectives and descriptions, although the term
primitiv is used frequently.90
After providing a description of the defining elements of the earliest style,
Conze further supports his identification by contrasting it to the succeeding
orientaliserende style.91 Although Conze sees similarities in the preference for
parallel horizontal bands, a desire to fill empty space, and the use of animal
figures, the primary differences included the new appearance of floral motifs,
lions, tigers, and hybrid animals and the reduction of some of the most prominent geometric elements.92 In this process of distinguishing artistic difference,
Conze embedded the fundamentally divisive principle of Orientalism within
a seemingly straightforward identification of artistic style.93 He was defining
88
89
90
91
92
93

Conze 1870.
Conze 1870, 14–15; Tav. V.
For more information on Conze’s discussion of Geometric style, see Basu 2013.
An example of this style is depicted in Conze 1870, Tav. XI.
Conze 1870, 16–18.
Conze often refers to the pottery of the earliest Greek artistic style as unsere Vasen, a slight
but subtle way of distinguishing them from the ‘Other.’

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the West, and its earliest period of art, based upon its difference from the later
Oriental influences that can be seen in orientaliserende pottery.
Although Conze’s project is fundamentally shaped as a project of Orientalism, the language he used to describe the orientaliserende style is relatively
neutral, unlike the art historical language that will characterize later works
on this style. The most suggestive descriptors used to for this style are Fülle
(fullness), phantastischen (fantastic, strange), reichere (rich), and durchgebildetere (well-educated, cultured).94 In employing such descriptors of style,
Conze planted the seeds of Orientalism, using words that came to signify the
decline of the older, more advanced East through its desire for wealth, richness, and opulence. In his definition of stylistic categories, Conze appears to
imply a neutral meaning for these terms since they are not used to support a
larger narrative of negative artistic influence from the East or a resulting cultural decline in Greece as a result of this artistic change. However, Conze does
imply that Oriental influence marks the end of an art that can be claimed to
be exclusively of Greek invention. The definition that Conze constructed for
the orientaliserende style is one that has remained relatively unchanged even
today: painted vessels that are characterized by more elaborate, rounded features, a predominance of fantastic animals and plant forms, and a background
filled with zigzags, diamonds, and especially rosettes.95 The descriptive characteristics that Conze employed for describing the orientaliserende style have
become weaponized as part of a larger Orientalist discourse that dismisses
these characteristics as mere decoration and disparages the value of Eastern
art, using the lack of human figural representation as evidence of the inferior
qualities of the East, all of which are present in the late nineteenth-century art
historical handbooks that are discussed below. Although such a categorization
might still fit this particular class of painted ‘orientalizing’ pottery, focusing the
stylistic definition on a single material type only obscures the broader assemblage of objects later described by the term ‘orientalizing’ by overgeneralizing
their definition.
One of the most important influences of Orientalism in Conze’s definition
of this artistic style as orientaliserende was that such a term obfuscated the
precise origin of the style, treating all regions of the eastern Mediterranean as
having no discernable or meaningful differences. It seems that this very quality
of geographic blurriness made the term orientaliserende appealing to Conze
for this particular class of pottery since it did not require pinpointing a specific origin of production for this style. As he notes, other more geographically
94
95

Conze 1870, 17–20.
Conze 1870, 20.

Etruscan Orientalization

33

precise names had been used to describe it (phönicisirend, korinthischen, ägyptisirend); however, since many of the motifs could be traced to Assyrian sources
originally, Conze chooses the term orientaliserende while acknowledging that
it is in fact too general.96 This preference for a simple umbrella term implies
that in the process of movement from Assyrian sources to other peoples within
the Near East, each of these unique and entirely different groups of people
enacted no significant or noteworthy change, meaning that it was unnecessary
to acknowledge the contributions for any particular group. By assigning a geographically obscure origin to this style, the seemingly neutral descriptive language used to describe the objects as full and rich can easily be seen as the kind
of stereotyping language used to characterize Eastern art. Conze’s concern lay
in trying to define the evolution of Western art, allowing for a reduction of the
complexities and specific histories of the East.
After laying out the characteristics of the two earliest artistic styles of Greek
art, Conze does little to explain exactly how eastern influences came to Greece
and how the change in style occurred. The encounter is described in terms of
conflict and defeat, between Western artistic traditions and Oriental influence.
The exact mechanisms of how this orientaliserende came to rule Greece are
not explicated, but the Greeks are described as first “confronting” (entgegentreten) Oriental influence and then “succumbing” (erliegen) to it because of its
“overwhelming superiority.”97 The discussion of changes in artistic style as a
clash of cultures falls into the fundamental Orientalist divide between East
and West which does not allow for positive Eastern influence. Any influence
from the East must be confronted and countered. This is why it was important
for Conze to finish his work with the assertion that the earlier Greek artistic
style, described as primitiv, was not completely erased by this strange ( fremd)
new style.98 Even after the overwhelming influence of the Orient, there was
still something fundamentally Greek at the heart of their artistic practice. In
this confrontation between East and West, Greece was the first and one of the
main disseminators of this new style to the rest of the western Mediterranean.
Conze states that orientaliserende also spread to Etruria but only after the
Etruscans were influenced by the Greeks; Etruria, in turn, was then the conduit for the influx of these new forms and ideas into Italy.99 Such an opinion
was in keeping with the German tradition established by Winckelmann that
Etruria’s main source of artistic influence and the subsequent development
96
97
98
99

Conze 1870, 19.
Conze 1870, 26, 28–29.
Conze 1870, 28–29.
Conze 1870, 26.

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of civilization was Greece. The implication, even from the beginning, was not
just that they brought a new artistic style, but that they set in motion, with this
new style, ‘historical processes’ which had been absent in the earliest phases of
each Western nation’s art.
The nature of the confrontation between East and West and the concomitant artistic evolution is defined as analogous to modern instances of colonialism later in Conze’s work. In his 1897 lecture to the Royal Prussian Academy of
Sciences, Conze presented “On the Origin of the Visual Arts,” a paper in which
he discusses the evolution of his definition of Geometric art after over 20 years
of archaeological discoveries, particularly those made by Heinrich Schliemann
in Mycenae.100 The topic of the lecture demonstrates a clear tie between the
intellectually prominent subject of the day, the origins of Western civilization,
and the development of artistic styles. In his quest to understand the thought
process behind the Geometric style, he drew on contemporary ethnographic
research of so-called primitive societies in Australia, Brazil, and the peoples
of the Pacific Ocean for comparative analogies.101 By connecting the earlier
Geometric style in Greece, which immediately preceded contacts with more
advanced civilizations from the East, to the art of ‘primitive’ tribes, Conze
established an ancient corollary for those pre-colonial indigenous populations
being encountered by European colonists at the time. Therefore, Conze drew
a direct analogy between modern colonial encounters and those of the much
earlier ‘orientalizing’ period. However, he qualified this analogy by stating that,
in the ancient instance:
bis sie nach und nach durch den Einfluss vom Süden her in den Kreis
einer aus den Ländern am Ostwinkel des Mittelmeers stammenden,
reicheren Kunstformenwelt gezogen wurden. Aber dabei verlosch ihr
eigenartiges Kunstempfinden nicht endgültig rasch, wie heut zu Tage das
der Wilden vor der viel übermächtiger über sie kommenden Berührung
mit höher entwickelter Kultur.
They were incrementally drawn into the influence from a realm of more
abundant artistic forms emanating from the eastern regions of the
Mediterranean. Yet this did not cause their own artistic sensibilities to

100
101

Conze 1897; translation by Johns 2012.
Conze cites a number of different ethnographic works by Ernst Grosse, Karl von den
Steinen, H.M. Stanley, Garrick Mallery, Anton Springer, Charles H. Read, William H. Holmes
and a work on the art of children by Corrado Ricci.

Etruscan Orientalization

35

quickly evaporate as is happening in our own days when these cultures
are exposed to the overwhelming influence of the developed cultures.102
For Conze, Greece was not a passive receptor of culture and civilization, willing to give up everything in the face of an overwhelmingly more advanced
society – unlike the European perception of the outcome of modern colonial encounters. Rather, Greece maintained its own artistic trajectory, while
incorporating the elements it wished from the East. Such a double-standard
between perceptions of ancient and modern colonial encounters was essential
to the belief in Western exceptionalism at the heart of Orientalism. No matter
the period or outcome, this framing of colonialism posits its effects as positive
and beneficial for the colonized group. In his definition of the Geometric style,
Conze intertwines the debate over European origins and the evolution of artistic styles into a direct relationship, thereby creating the ‘orientalizing’ period
as the origin of the first stages of art and therefore Western civilization. The
development of Western civilization was a direct result of this early colonial
encounter, meaning that the ideas behind the ‘orientalizing’ period are ones of
progress, the reshaping of artistic style, and of advancement.
Preserving the active role of the Greek artist and craftsperson under the
assumed pressure of Oriental influence is what caused the term ‘orientalizing,’ an active term rather than the passive ‘orientalized,’ to be chosen as the
designation of this period of East/West interaction, even if it took decades to
finally become common parlance. This delay was primarily due to the fact
that Conze’s original intent in defining the Geometric style was to isolate and
explicate the origins of art within Western civilization and not to create a new
classification, ‘orientalizing,’ or to describe a particular type of interaction. In
order to concretely delineate the Geometric style, however, Conze needed, at
some level, to define what came afterward in order to provide a bounded limit
to his Geometric phase. Since his definition came at a time when Greek art
history was especially concerned with assessing the exact nature of Oriental
influences upon Greek art, there was no consensus on a concise and finite term
to describe the process or period whose products were characterized by a proliferation of wild beasts and vivid floral motifs with strong ties to various locations in the eastern Mediterranean.
As Conze himself acknowledged, ‘orientalizing’ was not the only potential
term in existence at this time that could have been selected. Since scholars
were seeking to condense the debate on eastern influences in Greece into a
coherent term, new designations emerged that limited this interaction to a
102

Johns 2012 translation of Conze 1897.

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single period. In 1880, C.T. Newton articulated a chronological span called the
Graeco-Phoenician period that fell between the time of the Homeric poems
(850) and the fall of Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire (560),103 incorporating newly published finds from Mycenae to tighten the chronology. Although
Newton’s definition was clearly meant to apply to Greece, finds from Italy were
often used as examples to describe objects associated with the period and as
comparisons to scenes and objects in Homer.104 For example, Newton compares the design and techniques used on the Shield of Achilles to Phoenician
bowls and the great shield found in the Regolini-Galassi tomb, showing a
connection between Etruscan ‘orientalizing’ objects and Homer that is still
prominent in interpretations today.105 In a nearly identical use of language,
Maxime Collignon called a similar time span the Graeco-Oriental period in
his 1886 A Manual of Greek Archaeology.106 This, too, was focused on a period
in which Greeks received ideas from ‘more advanced’ Eastern civilizations, but
Collignon readily admitted that the chronological boundaries, particularly for
the beginning, are rather fuzzy. He sets the lower limits securely at the end
of the seventh century when “the Greeks were in full possession of technical
processes, and that at about that date the history of Greek art really begins.”107
Here again there is a connection with Homeric civilization, which Collignon
categorized as being “half Oriental,” stating that much of its architecture and
decoration more closely resembled palaces in Assyria than Greece and comparing the physical descriptions provided by Homer with the physical remains
found in Nineveh and Khorsabad.
For Western scholars interested in asserting the superiority of Western
art, these two alternative terms presented an equal encounter between East
and West which prevented them from being chosen over ‘orientalizing.’ The
Graeco-Phoenician/Graeco-Oriental title places the two camps of West and
East at the same level, as equal partners in defining the chronological phase
(although Graeco does take the primary position). Almost counterintuitively,
the choice of the term ‘orientalizing’ does two things to sublimate the East in
order to emphasize the achievements of the West. The first is that by removing
‘Graeco’ at the beginning it tacitly implies that this group is the natural subject
103
104
105
106
107

Newton 1880, 289.
Newton (1880, 290–291) uses the Homeric word athyrmata to describe the type of objects
that characterize the period, such as engraved shells found at Vulci, Kamiros, Nimrud, and
Bethlehem.
Rathje 1990; Mandolesi and Sannibale 2012.
Collignon and Wright 1886.
Collignon and Wright 1886, 27.

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37

of the term ‘orientalizing.’ To put it another way, the Greeks are the active
group to whom this period refers; the Orient cannot have an ‘orientalizing’
phase. The term’s open quality also means it can refer to any civilization that
is part of the West (such as Italy) as long as the group is not already considered
Oriental. The second effect of the term is that – by making this entirely an ‘orientalizing’ phase, one which could not also be experienced by peoples actually
in the Orient such as Egypt, Phoenicia, Assyria, etc. – it actively excludes the
people of the Orient from being any part of Mediterranean history. By placing
their contributions at a nascent stage in the development of Greek art, they are
enshrined as a people frozen in time, not subject to the evolutionary changes
of the next chronological phases. The Orient, therefore, played no part in the
artistic perfection later achieved in Classical Greece.
The exclusionary practices that led to the preference of ‘orientalizing’ above
other designations for the period were greatly influenced by the pervasiveness
of Orientalism in Greek art history at this time. Many of the handbooks of the
late 1800s contain a language of ‘Otherness’ used to describe the Oriental elements present in Greek art as a harrowing episode in the West’s encounter with
the Eastern Other. The types of representations found on pottery and other
imported objects are described in a variety of deprecating terms, from something that is merely dismissive, such as “decoration” or “ornament” in opposition to narrative imagery,108 to the more insidious connection with “luxury”
and “opulence,”109 or the descriptions of animal friezes as “monsters,” “horrid,”
and “mongrel.”110
Heroes in this struggle, the Greek artists had to endure a period of Oriental
influence, obtain the technical skills they needed in order to express their own
artistic genius, and then break away before the truly negative attributes of the
Orient had any permanent repercussions.111 Jane Harrison described this as a
“flood of Oriental contagion of hideous forms” that the Greeks had to fight
back, and Maxime Collignon characterized it as a phase from which Greek artists needed to “emancipate” themselves.112 Such emancipatory rhetoric is particularly important because the time of Oriental influence is depicted as one
of “slavish copying and imitation,” something to be overcome in order to finally
108
109
110
111
112

Harrison 1885, 63, 127, 146, 158.
Martha 1889, 105, 114, 584.
Harrison 1885, 63, 96, 146, 135, 179.
Collignon and Wright 1886, 15, 26, 33.
Harrison 1885, 179; Collignon and Wright 1886, 27. Birch (1858, 269) uses similar emancipatory language.

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achieve the ideal of Classical Greek art.113 This attitude is most dramatically
presented by Jane Harrison:
When we watch the Greek artist so to speak face to face with the
Phoenician workman, it is then we best feel the contrast, the essential, unutterable, unchangeable difference between the two. At first the
Greek, beholding this wonderful mastery of technique, is amazed; he
copies blindly with reverent astonishment; he decorates his vase with a
series of friezes which are but rows of Oriental monsters; he takes the
pattern ready-made, marveling at its dexterity, feeling its decorative fitness. But he was not born to decorate; he has a soul to think, and therefore
a thought to express; so bit by bit, the Oriental monsters go down to their
own place, they are subordinated to purely decorative functions, which
from their very lifelessness, they so admirably fulfill. The main body of his
space the artist keeps to utter his thought – at first naturalistically, later,
as we shall see, ideally. It is in this absorbing and assimilating of the good,
this refusing of the evil, nay, more, in this turning of what is expressively
bad into what is decoratively good, that we see the artist instinct of an
artist-born race.114
While this quotation is filled with much of the typically pejorative language
identified previously, it also explicitly lays out the process by which Western artists used their encounter with the East to establish the beginnings of Western
civilization within the ‘orientalizing’ period. The artist moves from copying to
thinking, from lifeless Oriental monsters to naturalistic and later ideal representation, and from refusing the evil of the East to expressing the decorative
good of the West; all based on their own inherent racial ability. The period’s construction followed an observation noted in an 1835 work on ancient sculpture
in which Richard Payne Knight commented that the remote periods of history
are often classed “by some common attribute of imperfection.”115 Therefore, as
seen in Harrison’s work and the other art historical manuals of the late nineteenth century, the imperfection of this period is the Oriental. In the quest to
clarify the relationship between East and West, these works of Greek art history needed to subordinate the imperfection of the East by sublimating their
113
114
115

This stigma was passed on to the Etruscans, who were often thought of as imitating Greek
art and not living up to their ideal. See Izzet 2007a for a full discussion of this bias against
Etruscan art.
Harrison 1885, 146–47, italics mine.
Knight 1835, xlv.

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39

contributions to Western civilization. The ‘orientalizing’ period is thus categorized as the intellectual and artistic conquest of the West over the East not
solely in the sense of artistic achievement but even in a battle between good
and evil. The ‘orientalizing’ period is perceived by nineteenth-century scholarship as a chronological period analogous to their own imperialist and colonial
expansion; intellectual understanding and mastery were important aspects of
both victories and an essential way to construct modern European identity. In
both instances, either for Greece and Etruria as the receptors of Eastern art or
in the reverse where the Europeans are the disseminators of culture through
modern colonialist expansion, the Europeans emerged victorious regardless of
the directionality of cultural diffusion.
Italian Orientalizing: Between arte/periodo orientalizzante and the
Eastern Origin of the Etruscans
As these three alternative terms (Graeco-Phoenician, Graeco-Oriental, and orientaliserende) were being coined and debated within the realm of Greek art,
the first art historical handbooks on exclusively Italian and Etruscan art were
being written. Since the assertions of Guarnacci, the Etruscans were seen as
the first truly Italian civilization, and so they were often isolated from the other
Iron Age peoples of the Italian peninsula as being the first creators of art, one
of the foremost markers of civilization. An increasing number of texts sought
to bring Italian, and particularly Etruscan art, out from its secondary role
either as simply a location for finds of Greek art or as a tangential deviation
in art’s linear and upward evolution. These comprehensive histories of both
Italian and Etruscan art employed a much different method of understanding
the relationship between the Italian peninsula and the Orient than the simple
binaries of Greek art history. In Italy, by contrast, understanding the varieties of
connections and interactions required a more complex explanation. Although
the Phoenicians were still depicted as one of the primary foils, as commercial middlemen responsible for the majority of maritime activity as well as the
craftspeople who created the eclectic mix of artistic forms from Assyria and
Egypt, scholars were also compelled to define the relationship between Italy
and Greece, whose similar artistic styles necessitated some explanation and
chronological coordination. Apart from the difficult task of defining the roles
of each of these players, Italy had the added wrinkle of the debate over the
origin of the Etruscans, which needed to be reconciled with any terminology
and periodization constructed.
In the earliest works in the late nineteenth century on Italian and Etruscan
art based in Etruscology, the eastern origin of the Etruscans tended to dominate. This eastern migration, which had been heavily under fire at the time
4.2

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from German scholarship asserting a trans-Alpine northern origin, gained
new credence through the work of Edoardo Brizio. The Italian archaeologist
made the first comprehensive argument for Etruscan eastern origins by pairing ancient literary accounts with objects and architecture recently found in
Etruria that had ties to the eastern Mediterranean. While listing all the evidence that pointed to an eastern origin for the Etruscans, Brizio also severely
critiqued the German arguments for a southern migration from central
Europe. Brizio argued that the Etruscans must be from the east because of the
polygonal architecture of their walls, the radical change in funerary ritual from
cremation to inhumation (as well as the introduction of more elaborate tumuli
mounds and the tomba a camera architectural construction), and the pomp of
the ornaments and vessels used within the tombs.116 One of the most important tombs for this argument was the Regolini-Galassi tomb, which combined
the greatest number of these elements, uniting a tumulus structure similar to
Late Bronze Age treasuries in Mycenae, Sparta, and Lydia with the Phoenician
metal wares whose descriptions he matched to items in Homer, such as the
Shield of Achilles.117 These comparisons had been made in discussions of Greek
art history, but Brizio migrated them to Italian soil in an effort to understand
the dating and interpretation of these phenomena. Since no painted Greek
pottery was found within the tomb, Brizio assigned the tomb to the seventh
century, saying that it must have been before the sixth century when Wolfgang
Helbig had noted the beginning of the importation of Greek pottery.118 This
importantly separated both the tomb and the Etruscan migration process from
the later Greek colonization to the south and its concomitant ripple effects
along the Tyrrhenian coast. In part, it is this absence of Greek pottery that prevented Brizio from employing the term orientalizzante, either as a description
of the art from the Regolini-Galassi tomb and similar burials or as the period
to which the tombs would belong. The term orientalizzante or ‘orientalizing’
would have been completely inappropriate in this case since the entire argument centered on proving that the Etruscans were, in language and in material
culture, from the East and, therefore, Oriental not simply ‘orientalizing.’
Besides avoiding the use of orientalizzante, Brizio eschewed the language of
Orientalism that was so widespread at the time. In his study of the RegoliniGalassi tomb, Brizio directly embedded the original, neutral descriptions of
objects from the 1842 Vatican Museum publication discussed earlier. Since
they were of course used to argue for the westward migration of the Etruscans,
116
117
118

Brizio 1885, 157.
Brizio 1885, 146–47.
Brizio 1885, 146.

Etruscan Orientalization

41

they almost entirely avoid the negative, Orientalist connotations seen elsewhere. Instead, the more prominent modern discourse underlying Brizio’s
work was colonialism, something in which Italy was becoming more actively
involved at the end of the nineteenth century through their colonial actions
in Africa. The process described at various points throughout his work, by
which the Etruscans arrived on the Tyrrhenian shores and slowly conquered
and assimilated the local Umbrians to their superior Eastern way of life,
very closely resembled contemporary colonial actions. According to Brizio,
the Etruscans arrived and conquered the Umbrians not only because of the
superiority of their weapons but also with the help of “una grande cultura”
(a great culture) consisting of “grande prudenza civile e politica” (great civil
and political prudence) born in the older civilizations of Asia Minor.119 Brizio
provided a nuanced construction of the process of cultural change in the colonial encounter, comparing it to the Roman conquest of Este, in which many
indigenous practices carried on after initial conquest. The degree of cultural
change that eventually occurred and the type of monuments erected, however,
were not something Brizio believed could be the result of simply importing a
few scarabs, Phoenician gold, or Greek painted pottery; such changes had to
be the consequence of a wholesale migration.120 In arguing for the appearance of these objects and architectural forms through migration enacted in the
form of colonialism, Brizio became the first person to provide an explanatory
framework to account for how what would eventually be called ‘orientalizing’
material appeared in Italy.
Although Brizio was influential in the field of Italian archaeology more
broadly, his particular identification of material with the eastern origin of
the Etruscans did not take hold. The Lydian migration thesis still held, but
the dating of their arrival moved farther back in time as greater quantities of
excavated materials revealed deeper and more coherent artistic and stylistic traditions. In the first comprehensive study of Etruscan art, published in
1889, Jules Martha agreed to an eastern origin for the Etruscans but believed
that for many centuries they did not have a great deal in common with the
East, especially in the Villanovan period, until trade began with Phoenicia and
Carthage in the seventh century and eastern styles and luxuries arrived on the
Tyrrhenian coast.121 Although this trade argument fits within the later chronological boundaries of what will be called the ‘orientalizing’ period, Martha at
no time formalizes either the artistic style or the period as orientalisante.
119
120
121

Brizio 1885, 168–69.
Brizio 1885, 164.
Martha 1889, 21, 24.

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Perhaps the most important chronological divide between Etruscan migration and imported eastern objects was made by the Swedish archaeologist
Oscar Montelius, whose construction of the first relative and absolute chronology for the Bronze and Iron Age of central and northern Italy was presented in 1897 and then fully published in 1912.122 In stark contrast to the aim
of Brizio’s diffusionist work, Montelius sought to create a precise absolute
chronology for Italy to which other European countries could pin their own
relative chronologies, particularly, in his case, Scandinavia. Working from a
cultural historical approach, Montelius created five periods for the Bronze Age
and six for the Iron Age based on entire assemblages of multiple classes of
objects and then fixed these phases to an absolute chronology based on two
certain dates: a fifteenth-century date for Period 3 of the Bronze Age based
on the Peschiera fibula and the Bügelkanne vase type contemporary with the
Egyptian King Amenophis III and on the end point of Period 6 of the Iron Age
which he dates to between the François vase and the Persian destruction layer
in Athens, 600–480.123 The next most important fixed point, in between these
two boundaries, which Montelius spent even greater time discussing, was the
date of the Regolini-Galassi Tomb, whose date he pushed back to the ninth,
rather than the seventh, century. An entire period, Period 3 of the Iron Age, was
given over to this tomb and to similar materials in central Italy. It so typified
the standard assemblage of the period that Montelius frequently referred to
Period 3 as the Regulini-Galassi-Zeit/Regulini-Galassi-Periode, one of only two
periods of the eleven in total to have been assigned a descriptive rather than
solely numeric name.124 In assigning the name of the tomb that had the greatest number of objects described as ‘orientalizing,’ Montelius opened the door
to assigning the ‘orientalizing’ style to a set chronological period and to the
wide variety of goods present in that tomb, enshrining the historical division
between East and West within the structuring of history.
While Montelius assigned an entire period to the Regolini-Galassi tomb, he
never used the term orientaliserende. Unlike Brizio, this was not because he
viewed the material from Period 3 (Regulini-Galassi-Periode) as something that
accompanied the Etruscans from their Oriental home and, therefore, an artistic style that did not need to be ‘orientalized.’ Although Montelius believed that
the Etruscans were from Lydia, he dated their arrival to the eleventh century,

122
123
124

Montelius 1897a, 1912.
Montelius 1897a, 262–64.
The other was Period 2 of the Iron Age – Tomba del Guerriero-Periode.

Etruscan Orientalization

43

much earlier than the material that Brizio associated with their migration.125
Rather, Montelius never used the term orientaliserende simply because such
interpretive terms were outside of the goal of his project, and he had a preference for unambiguous description and numerical classification instead of a
term designed to condense a debate on artistic style. In separating the period
of interaction with the eastern Mediterranean, Period 3, from the period of
Corinthian pottery within Italy (the material defined by Conze as orientaliserende), Period 5, Montelius created the need to explain both of these periods
through different sets of interactions. Embedded in the culture-historical paradigm of archaeological thought, these different periods would require interaction with entirely different groups of people: in this case the Phoenicians
for the first period and Greeks for the second. Although orientaliserende had
come to define a style of Greek pottery, more than anything its main role was
in describing the initial meeting between East and West, and in the case of
Italy and based on Montelius’s chronology, this would mean a time before the
arrival of Greek colonies and goods in Italy. Therefore, the original construction of an ‘orientalizing’ period in Italy would have to be limited to this Period 3
and the interactions with the Phoenicians.
It is in the early 1900s that the ‘orientalizing’ period becomes formalized
and accepted within the historical chronology of Italian antiquity, primarily
through two comprehensive works: Alessandro Della Seta’s Italia antica in 1922
and Pericle Ducati’s Storia dell’arte etrusca in 1927.126 Stemming from Montelius’
production of a schematic chronology for central Italy, previously debated
artistic styles now began to be fit within these newly constructed, but not
systematically or historically explained, chronological periods. Additionally,
Montelius’ work placed the question of Etruscan origins further back in time
and separated the hotly debated issue from the objects that will be described
as ‘orientalizing.’ The first instance, to my knowledge, of periodo orientalizzante within Italian archaeological or art historical literature comes from
Alessandro Della Seta’s guide to the Villa Giulia published in 1918.127 Rather
than any clear definition for this particular periodization of material within
the Villa Giulia, this period designation comes after eighty pages describing
objects as being “nel periodo dell’importazione del materiale orientalizzante”
(in the period of importation of orientalizing material), making the use of the
125

126
127

Montelius 1897b, 260. In the discussion on the origin of the Etruscans and Mycenaeans
that accompanied Montelius’ presentation of chronology, however, he makes a number of
comparisons between Etruscan migration and Roman colonization, following the intellectual trend established by Brizio (Montelius 1897b, 256–57).
Della Seta 1922; Ducati 1927.
Della Seta 1918, 82.

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two-word phrase seem to be chiefly for the sake of convenience and brevity.
Della Seta chose not to use the moniker provided for the period by Montelius,
Regulini-Galassi-Periode, most likely because its specificity would be confusing
when used to discuss other tombs and materials present in the Villa Giulia, and
its ninth-century date given by Montelius did not fit with the seventh-century
assignation Della Seta gave to periodo orientalizzante. Furthermore, the historical narrative Della Seta offered at the beginning of the guide was based less on
the chronological prevalence of types of objects, as was the case for Montelius,
but rather was structured by successive waves of influences and their subsequent artistic imitations, beginning with the Phoenicians and then followed by
the Greeks.128 Therefore for Della Seta, the chronology of the Italic peoples was
not something locally controlled but rather was defined as a series of artistic
and evolutionary advances encouraged by outside forces, reflecting the view
promoted by Winckelmann for the impetus of artistic change and resembling
the kind of colonial framework that is so prevalent in scholarship of his time.129
Della Seta continued to frame the historical narrative of Italy as a succession
of waves of foreign influences in his larger work concerning the history of the
entire Italian peninsula, Italia antica (1922). In fact, this framework of foreign
influence can be traced to his understanding of the very origin of the Etruscans
themselves. Della Seta aligned most closely with the Herodotean assertion of
an eastern origin for the Etruscans, which along with the recent find of an
Etruscan inscription on Lemnos, led Della Seta to excavate on Lemnos to identify possible evidence of this eastern migration.130 Della Seta described the
Etruscan migration to Italy in parallel terms to the Jewish diaspora, a view likely
informed by his own Jewish heritage.131 The Etruscans who migrated from Asia
Minor were discussed as comprising a small group of people with a fundamentally different character to others in Italy, especially in terms of their religion.
But rather than focus on the eastern origin of the Etruscans, Della Seta believed
that focus needed to shift to an understanding of the process of their formation as an Etruscan civilization in Italy, paving the way for Massimo Pallottino’s
later influential stance on the subject of Etruscan origins.132 For Della Seta,
the issues of Etruscan origins and ‘orientalizing’ material were chronologically
separate events, a position that contrasts with Brizio’s use of ‘orientalizing’
material as evidence of Etruscan eastern migration. Instead, ‘orientalizing’
128
129
130
131
132

Della Seta (1918, 33) described periodo orientalizzante as “Si ebbe così un’arte orientalizzante d’imitazione” (There was thus an orientalizing art of imitation).
On the similarities to Winckelmann, see Harari 2000, 50–51.
Della Seta 1937; Harari 2000; Paltineri 2000.
Harari 2000, 54; Bellelli 2016, 258.
Della Seta 1922, 160; Bagnasco Gianni 2013, 29.

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45

material was tied to the Phoenicians, whose seventh-century imports arrived
after the Etruscans had established themselves along the Tyrrhenian shores.
The nature of the Etruscan ethnic identity was less important in Della Seta’s
perspective than the degree of influence from outside forces, especially from
the Greeks who would have the most dramatic and consequential influence on
Etruscan art.
Della Seta codifies the ‘orientalizing’ as a distinct phase in Italia antica
(1922), making a more deliberate definition of the so-called ‘orientalizing’
period:
Nei prodotti che primi importarono in Italia i Fenici, e che qui anche
furono fabbricati, si scorge questa unione di elementi diversi, questa preponderanza di elementi orientali, cosicchè tale periodo, che corrisponde
all’incirca al VII a.C., si dice orientalizzante.
In the products that the Phoenicians first import into Italy, and also those
that were produced here, one sees this union of diverse elements, this
preponderance of oriental elements, so that such a period, that corresponds to the beginning of the seventh century, is called orientalizing.133
In the description of the way in which these ‘orientalizing’ objects were composed as being a union of diverse elements, his language resembles more recent
and more nuanced treatments of the material. Throughout the rest of the narrative, however, the language of Orientalism colors the nature of the interaction between Italy and the Phoenicians and serves to divide the Phoenicians
from later Greek activity on the peninsula.
The methods and the language Della Seta used are familiar in their resemblance to the examples given earlier of Orientalism within Greek art history.
The first description of the Phoenicians, based on Homer but believed to be
faithful to archaeological reality, invokes the stereotypically negative characteristics given to the Phoenicians: “navigatori, commercianti, pirati e rapitori
di donne” (sailors, merchants, pirates and kidnappers of women).134 The connection to the kidnapping of women and an emphasis on the appeal of these
imported objects to female vanity objectifies the Orient and its products as
decadent and feminine, while the characterization of Phoenician art as “scaturita dall’avidità di guadagno” (originating from the greed of profit) evokes

133
134

Della Seta 1922, 74.
Della Seta 1922, 73.

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the Semitic stereotypes of greed and avarice.135 Although one might argue
that such derisive language is merely superficial, the most harmful aspect of
Orientalism in Della Seta’s work is the implication that the period failed to make
any long-term impact, instead being viewed solely as preparing Italy for the
influence of the real, more pure art and civilization of the Greeks.136 Whereas
Greece was able to overthrow the Oriental influences in order to bring forth its
own originality of thought and idealism during the ‘orientalizing’ period, Italy
was unable to ‘emancipate’ itself from the same encounter without the aid of
Greece, thus leaving Italian and Etruscan art in a subordinate position. In Italy,
the initial Phoenician influence that became connected to the original definition of the ‘orientalizing’ period was a false start, an Eastern aberration that
was later righted through Greek influence and colonization.
These two separate events, the initial, Oriental influence, which was perceived as flawed, and the later Greek emancipation – the two main characteristics of the earliest definitions of a new ‘orientalizing’ period within Italy – were
later enshrined by Ducati as distinct phases within a single period: Proto‘orientalizing’ and ‘orientalizing,’ or l’arte orientalizzante antica e orientalizzante
più recente. Although Montelius was the first to divide primarily Phoenician/
Egyptian/Assyrian material (Period 3) from the later Greek Corinthian wares
(Period 5), he did not group the appearance of these materials in Italy as part
of the same or even related phenomena. Since the later material (Period 5) had
been classified as part of the Greek ‘orientalizing’ period (in Conze’s original
definition of the term), the creation of the ‘orientalizing’ period in Etruscan
or Italian art would thus have to span from Period 3 (900–800) until Period 5
(700–600) in order to properly encompass Italy’s initial encounter with the
East and its reception of subsequent Greek ‘orientalizing’ material, especially
since the Greek artistic influence was so crucial to the idea of evolutionary
advancement. ‘Orientalizing,’ therefore, would serve as a descriptive marker
for all of these stages within the Italian context, but the dominant Orientalism
of the time made it necessary to keep Oriental and Greek influence as more
distinct entities on Italian soil. When Pericle Ducati wrote Storia dell’arte
etrusca in 1927, the ‘orientalizing’ period was consequently made up of two
separate phases, l’arte orientalizzante più antica (700–625) and l’arte orientalizzante (625–575), each of which was given its own chapter.
135

136

Della Seta 1922, 80. This language is particularly surprising considering Della Seta’s Jewish
heritage, which caused him to be removed as director of the Scuola archeologica italiana
del Atene after the passage of the racial laws in 1938. This occurred even though this particular work, Italia antica, contained rhetoric of Italian nationalism and Fascism.
Della Seta 1922, 82, 91.

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47

In this work, Ducati used a lower chronology than Montelius, defining
the first ‘orientalizing’ period as stretching between two of the most prominent Etruscan tombs: the tomba del guerriero at Tarquinia at the upper limit
(700) while the Regolini-Galassi tomb at Cerveteri marked the lower limit
(625).137 This lower chronology was necessary for Ducati to accommodate
his understanding of when the eastern migration of the Etruscans occurred.
For Ducati, the Tyrrhenians sailed from Lydia and landed on the Tyrrhenian
coast between the end of the ninth century and the early years of the eighth
century.138 In his later work dealing explicitly with the question of Etruscan
origins, Ducati characterized their arrival as analogous to European colonialism, comprising a superiorly gifted minority that settled on the coasts in land
already occupied by the more numerous but more primitive Umbrians.139 By
adopting part of the civilization of the Umbrians among whom they settled,
but maintaining their own cultural heritage which Ducati described as having greater similarities with the Greeks of Asia Minor, the Tyrrhenians fused
with the Umbrians to create the Etruscan people.140 In Storia dell’arte etrusca,
Ducati situates the entirety of the Tyrrhenian arrival, colonization, and
Etruscan development in the Geometric period of art. This was contrary to his
teacher Edoardo Brizio who believed that ‘orientalizing’ art was evidence of
the eastern migration of the Etruscans.141 Instead, the Tyrrhenian arrival provided an animating spark that enriched the Geometric art of the Umbrians and
then quickly transformed this art into an ‘orientalizing’ style. In fact, the upper
limit of l’arte orientalizzante più antica is marked by the tomba del guerriero at
Tarquinia, which Ducati claims as evidence of one of the first true Etruscans
not a Tyrrhenian immigrant.142
The expansion of the grandiose tombs of the seventh century corresponded
to the expansion of the Etruscans into the interior of the Italian peninsula and
with it, items of l’arte orientalizzante. Ducati states that ‘orientalizing’ art can
be categorized by 3 groups (Egyptian, Phoenician-Cypriot, and Greek) and that
it encompassed both actual imports and the local adoption of Oriental motifs.143
In the section describing l’arte orientalizzante più antica, Ducati discussed the
imported gold, silver, ivory, and bronze wares as part of the Phoenician-Cypriot
137
138
139
140
141
142
143

Ducati 1927, 153. These tombs correspond to the names of Periods 2 (1000–900) and 3
(900–800) respectively of Montelius’ chronology (1912, 62, 78).
Ducati 1927, 13.
Ducati 1938, 170.
Ducati 1938, 184.
Ducati 1927, 61.
Ducati 1938, 185.
Ducati 1927, 113–14.

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and Egyptian influx, which he separated as distinct from the later predominance of Greek influence that reworked and perfected the artistic style of the
East (625–575).144 Neither of these periods were constructed as hermetically
sealed receptors of only a single source of influence. In the earlier ‘orientalizing’ period, the Geometric style continued to be used as later proto-Corinthian
pottery began to be imported from Greece while in the later period gold and
silver jewelry continued arriving from the eastern Mediterranean.
The broader implications of dividing these two periods presented itself in
the return to the language of Orientalism, in which l’arte orientalizzante più
antica is characterized by Phoenician art that is called “bastarda” (bastard),
“industriale” (industrial),145 “funzione meramente ornamentale” (merely ornamental in function),146 made up of trinkets or baubles (chincaglierie) and
executed through “imitazione pedissequa” (slavish imitation).147 Indeed, the
Eastern art from which this artistic style originated is characterized as being
frozen in historical time, repeating the same motifs and patterns that had
existed for centuries and were then industrially recreated by the Phoenicians.148
The Etruscans were then emancipated from this slavish and bastardized art
by the Greeks, whose introduction of myth and emphasis on human figures
marked the main difference between it and the earlier ‘orientalizing’ period.149
This Greek input is seen as directly advancing the Etruscans along the evolutionary process, as Etruscan art is characterized in the preface of the book
as a grafted art, continuously borrowing from others, just as Della Seta had
imagined: an art that needed this kind of external assistance only to eventually become “travolta ed assorbita nella portentosa unificazione dell’Italia nel
nome di Roma, e nel trionfale affermarsi dell’arte imperiale romana” (overwhelmed and absorbed in the portentous unification of Italy in the name of
Rome, and in the triumphal affirmation of Imperial Roman art).150
It is in the exultation of eventual Roman dominion that we see part of the
political aim of Ducati’s work, as a text to describe the precursors to the glory
of Rome, an historical entity that served as an ancient example for the modern
Fascist regime in Italy. In the middle of the 1920s, even as archaeology and art
history sought to establish stable chronological periodization and definitions,
Italy itself was going through radical political change. The rise of Fascism within
144
145
146
147
148
149
150

Ducati 1927, 114.
Ducati 1927, 116.
Ducati 1927, 151.
Ducati 1927, 142.
Ducati 1927, 40.
Ducati 1927, 174–75, 213.
Ducati 1927, 10.

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49

the peninsula and the transfer of power to Mussolini in the fall of 1922 had
far-reaching consequences that stretched into the realm of academia. There
was a broad trend in scholarship away from the study of pre-Roman Italy to a
focus on the rise to power of the Roman Empire and later Augustus.151 Whereas
the pre-Roman peoples of Italy had served as a model for the Risorgimento in
the nineteenth century, Rome had now taken over as the historical antecedent for a modern, strong, unified Italy. The historic precedent that the Roman
Empire served for Fascist ideology was much clearer than the organization
and character of pre-Roman groups within Italy, particularly since the origin
of the Etruscans was still hotly debated.152 The three possible origins for the
Etruscans – Lydia and the East, Rhaetia and the North, or Italy itself – had even
greater modern political implications given the prominent racial ideologies of
the time. An eastern origin would connect the Etruscans with Semitic races
considered degenerate within Nazi ideology153 while a Rhaetic origin would
link the Etruscans with the superior Nordic races, a more desirable historical
linkage as Italy moved to align itself more closely with Nazi Germany but an
interpretation that would mean their vaunted achievements could not be considered uniquely Italian.154
In opposition to much of the German scholarship of the time, Ducati
believed that the Etruscans were a Mediterranean race due to their eastern
origin,155 following the concept of the Mediterranean race made most prominent by anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi and economist and politician Giacomo
Acerbo, but this Mediterranean race was completely distinct from an Oriental
race, as stated in the 1938 Manifesto della razza. As a primary representative
of the Mediterranean race in Italy, the Etruscans served as the first group to
encounter Oriental style and ideals during the ‘orientalizing’ period, but they
were not successful in overcoming the negative influences of the East on their
own; they needed Greek artistic influence to overcome Oriental tendencies.156
The manner in which Ducati presented this ‘orientalizing’ encounter made the
eventual emancipation from trinkets and baubles composed in slavish imitation seem like a natural evolutionary step, one easily made by the Etruscans
once they saw what the Greeks had to offer. The Greek influences that made
151
152
153
154
155
156

Galaty and Watkinson 2004; Arthurs 2012; Roche and Demetriou 2018.
Haack 2012; Pucci 2016, 246; Harari 2017b.
For more discussion of the Nazi belief and dissemination that the Etruscans were from
the Orient, see Haack 2014; Da Vela 2016.
For the assertion of a Nordic origin for all pre-Roman peoples of Italy made by Himmler
and others, see Haack 2014, 265–66.
Rey 2016, 280.
Ducati 1927, 213.

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their mark during the later ‘orientalizing’ period and in the later period of
Ionic and Attic art made Etruscan art an important vessel for transporting the
most influential advances of Greek art into later Roman art, since the Romans
absorbed the Etruscans and improved upon their culture. Therefore, for Ducati
the Etruscans represented an initial misstep in the first Orientalist encounter
between East and West. The real victors in this struggle, surpassing even the
Greeks, were the Romans, who Ducati believed were uniquely able to blend
characteristics from Mediterranean and Indo-European races. As Ducati
describes at the end of his 1938 Le probleme étrusque:
Ainsi, par l’étincelle animatrice de la race méditerranéenne, se forme une
Étrurie puissante et redoutable; mais bientôt elle s’amollit dans le bienêtre, dans l’opulence, et perd toute sa force d’expansion. Au contraire, au
sud du Tibre, à Rome, par la fusion de la race méditerranéenne (Sabins)
et de la race indo-européenne (Latins) se constitue un peuple où les meilleures qualités des deux races, au lieu de s’affaiblir et de dégénérer, se
renforcent l’une par l’autre; c’est la fusion de l’audace, de l’agilité méditerranéenne, et de la fermeté, de la ténacité indo-européenne; il en naît le
peuple romain.
Thus, by the animating spark of the Mediterranean race, a powerful and
formidable Etruria is formed; but soon it softens in well-being, in opulence, and loses all its force of expansion. On the contrary, to the south
of the Tiber, in Rome, by the fusion of the Mediterranean race (Sabines)
and the Indo-European race (Latins) is constituted a people where the
best qualities of the two races, instead of weakening and of degenerating,
reinforce the one to the other; it is the fusion of daring, of Mediterranean
agility, and of firmness, and of Indo-European tenacity; the Roman people are born from it.157
While the Etruscans softened in opulence following the initial spark of their
formation, echoing clear Orientalist tropes, the Romans were able to succeed by combining Western Indo-European characteristics of firmness and
tenacity with Mediterranean agility and audacity. Even this formulation
positions the Sabines as the feminine, Mediterranean, and Eastern force in
the creation of Rome; any negative attributes, however, are balanced out by
the male, Indo-European Latins. It is in this combination of Mediterranean
and Indo-European races that the Romans set themselves apart. While the
157

Ducati 1938, 187.

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51

‘orientalizing’ period in Etruria cataloged the first encounter in Italy with
Eastern, Oriental culture, serving as the beginning of the Orientalist struggle
within Italian history, the prevailing Fascist ideology required the Romans to
be the sole eventual victor and successful representative of the West.
Whereas during the nineteenth century the notion of an ‘orientalizing’
period served as a conduit through which older Eastern civilization sparked
the birth of Western civilization via interaction, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the term ‘orientalizing’ had been reduced to being used almost
purely for an artistic style that was inherited from the East but reworked and
improved in the West. The reduction in the historical ramifications from the
origins of civilization to artistic development was the direct result of a modern effort to sublimate Eastern contributions to European art and to downplay
the historical importance of the ‘orientalized’ Etruscans due to the pressure
of Orientalism and Fascism. While Ducati’s Storia dell’arte etrusca marks the
first time in which the dual-pronged/two-stage ‘orientalizing’ period becomes
enshrined in Etruscan chronology, it also serves as a pivot point in which ‘orientalizing’ begins to imply much more than simply Eastern influence on artistic motifs for Western artists.
This change can be seen through the subtle and seemingly innocuous introduction of the term principesca as a descriptor for the female inhabitant of the
most famous ‘orientalizing’ tomb and the marker of the lower limit of Ducati’s
early ‘orientalizing’ period, the Regolini-Galassi tomb.158 The term was added
in the context of discussing a large golden chest piece and fibula as an example of the advancing skill of Etruscan goldsmiths through the introduction of
new techniques by Phoenician-Cypriot objects, distinct from Greek ‘orientalizing’ goods. Although she is called a principessa and the other occupants of
the Regolini-Galassi tomb are called a family of ruling princes, there are no
further discussions of monarchy or the nature of government within Etruria at
the time. And while these Phoenician-Cypriot objects are described as being
similar to the motifs from reliefs in the royal palaces in Nimrud, there is no
implication that the objects carried any political ideology alongside their stylistic motifs. This falls in line with the antiquarian nature of archaeology at this
time, which lacked a more robust interrogation of the cultural processes that
lay behind the meeting of artistic styles in the ‘orientalizing’ period, but the
use of princely terminology would later come to encompass much more as its
interpretation expanded beyond simply the evolution of artistic style. This particular reference – within the discussion of gold objects of ornament and the
connection with feminine luxury – may indeed be another consequence of the
158

Ducati 1927, 134, 136.

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Orientalist discourse, but the limited use of principesca and principessa, each
of which only appeared once, caution against drawing any further conclusions.
By the end of the 1920s, the term ‘orientalizing’ had shifted from its role in
determining the origin of Western civilization (either coming from the East
or in reaction to interaction with the East) to a more reduced scope in which
it was narrowed to first an artistic style and then a chronological period. The
transition from its discussion in scholarship of Greek art history to the Etruscan
and Italian sphere combined Orientalism with a new nationalistic viewpoint
that placed Rome at the evolutionary end point of Italian superiority, to whom
the Etruscans served as a strong contributing force. The establishment of the
term ‘orientalizing’ as a chronological period, therefore, was not an innocuous,
descriptive choice, but rather the selection of an important historical turning
point for Italian history, one of the first historic encounters with the East, as
well as a divergent path that was briefly explored and subsequently rejected in
favor of Greek, Western influence.
5

Orientalizing to Orientalization: From Period to Process

The political climate of the 1930s and 40s saw a shift in the understanding
of cultural change that allowed ‘orientalizing’ to move from a description of
a chronological period to the process of ‘orientalization,’ in which Etruscan
peoples adopted not only Eastern artistic styles but also cultural practices,
governing structures, and ways of life. This expansion of the cultural implications of the term was in part influenced by Fascist attitudes on race and the
colonial ventures of the time, which led to the development of an idea of how
culture, not just artistic styles, might transfer between different peoples outside the context of conquest and mass-migrations. The key figure behind this
intellectual shift was Massimo Pallottino, the founder of modern twentieth
century Etruscology. Pallottino is most well-known for resolving the question
of Etruscan origins by focusing on an explanation of the process of Etruscan
civilizational formation on Italian soil rather than deciding on a single point of
origin for the people themselves.159
At the same time that Pallottino was formulating these ideas of cultural
formation, he was writing on Italian colonial actions in Africa. Antonio De
Francesco has revealed that Pallottino wrote thirty articles on African history for the social and corporative Fascist journal Rassegna sociale dell’Africa
159

Pallottino 1947.

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53

italiana between 1938 and 1943.160 Here, Pallottino wrote in support of Italian
colonialism in Africa and affirmed the power of the Italian cultural model to
colonize and civilize the peoples of Africa without the need for racial mixing.
The ancient analogy he used in this instance was one of Roman colonization:
“Rome did not destroy a people by superimposing itself upon them, but, bringing its own traits of organization and culture and only partly also its blood,
dragged them out from the shadow of pre- and proto-history towards a shining destiny.”161 This view that culture could transfer without a great degree of
racial mixing was crucial in a Fascist period whose racial agenda in 1938 was to
“make a complete distinction between Mediterranean Europeans on the one
hand and Orientals and Africans on the other” (È necessario fare una netta
distinzione fra i Mediterranei d’Europa [Occidentali] da una parte gli Orientali
e gli Africani dall’altra).162
Later, when Pallottino’s focus shifted back to his primary research interest in
the Etruscans, we can see an evolution in his ideas on race and the usefulness
of such a conception of race when discussing evidence for the origins of the
Etruscans, a people similarly located in “the shadow of pre- and proto-history.”
In his 1947 book L’origine degli Etruschi, he thoroughly critiqued the three
prominent ideas of Etruscan origins at the time: autochthony, migration from
the East, and migration from north of the Alps. He reviewed the various types
of data that had been used in each argument, dedicating sections to literary
sources, linguistic data, archaeological data, and finally, information related
to race, mentality, and costume. Clearly Pallottino believed that, at least in his
own scholarly effort, race was still a factor that needed to be addressed, but
he expressed a great deal of skepticism with this type of research and with
the usefulness of either cranial data or statuary and paintings for assistance in
identifying race and, even further, in answering the Etruscan origins question.163
While the concept of race waned in analytical value, the other concept that
Pallottino had been honing in his articles on Africa was the evolutionary and
propulsive power of an encounter with an advanced civilization. In the end,
Pallottino arrived at a solution for Etruscan origins that combined all three
major theories (Lydian, northern, and autochthonous) as identifying important contributions to the formation of the Etruscan nation, a process that took
160
161
162
163

First noted in De Francesco 2013 and further explored in Harari 2016.
De Francesco 2013, 207 translation of Pallottino 1943.
Il manifesto della razza 1938.
Pallottino 1947, 130. He cited Giuseppe Sergi, whose cranial research had led to an identification of a distinct razza mediterranea, and who had examined 44 Etruscan skulls, 34
of which belonged to the before-mentioned race and 10 to that of the euro-asiatica razza.
Sergi’s son, Sergio, was a signatory to Il manifesto della razza in 1938.

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place along the Tyrrhenian coast, and whose final formative phase he identified with the civiltà orientalizzante, a time in which Etruria became fully enveloped within the “circolo delle grandi civiltà mediterranee” (the circle of the
great Mediterranean civilizations).164
The idea that culture can spread beyond the geographic bounds of an ethnic group and that cultural transferal could occur without the need for forced
migration or complete racial replacement brought Pallottino to a completely
new conception of Etruscan origins. He firmly argued that the Tyrrhenian
coast was the crucible in which local traditions mixed with foreign elements
from the north and from the east across the Mediterranean Sea when historic
Etruria was formed between the tenth and sixth century.165 Now, the material
that Edoardo Brizio had used to prove an eastern origin for the Etruscans was
considered as part of the ‘orientalizing’ period, which marked the final stage
of Etruscan formation. This broader definition of an ‘orientalizing’ culture and
process appeared in an entry on “Orientalizing Style” in the Encyclopedia of
World Art, published a number of years later in 1965.166 Here we see the final,
most significant shift in meaning from ‘orientalizing’ style to ‘orientalization’:
What seems to have been a sudden and intense Orientalization of the
culture and taste of the Greek world, and subsequently of the Italian
peninsula, did not result from events of a political or military nature,
from invasions, penetrations, or subjugations, from the spread of religious ideas, or even from imposition of the cultural prestige of the East
(or why then only in a certain period?). Rather, the phenomenon can be
explained essentially in the light of the development on the waters of the
Mediterranean basin of an immense commercial activity fostered by a
happy combination of historical and economic circumstances.167
In this definition of cultural change, Pallottino has distinguished ‘orientalization’ from other colonial encounters, conquest, or migration by limiting the
impact to the realm of “culture and taste.” Although the nature of modern
Italian colonialism may have led Pallottino toward this kind of more nuanced
cultural transfer, something that did not require a great deal of racial mixing or replacement, the kind of ‘orientalization’ described here more closely
164
165
166
167

Pallottino 1947, 157.
Pallottino 1947, 152–60. In a number of articles in Rassegna sociale dell’Africa italiana,
Pallottino discussed the belief that peoples along the coasts, both in Italy and in Africa,
were more open to civilization than peoples living in the interior (Harari 2016, 172, 181).
Pallottino 1965.
Pallottino 1965, 784.

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55

resembles how ancient Rome was later shaped by the Hellenism coming from
Greece. The framework of Hellenism within Rome was seen as a mode of cultural influence that in its early phase did not take the form of conquest or topdown intervention and that in its later phases was brought on willingly by the
Romans themselves.168 This all occurred under what Pallottino calls “a happy
combination of historical and economic circumstances,” which involved the
beginning of historical encounters between East and West along with the new
existence of an interconnected Mediterranean aristocracy clamoring for an
“international style of luxury.”169
To the first point, we can see that Orientalism, which formed the foundation for Conze’s creation of the term ‘orientalizing,’ was still present nearly one
hundred years later and became further embedded in a newly delineated process of cultural change. Not only is ‘orientalization’ a transfer of civilization
from East to West, but it also marks a crucial turning point in exactly who the
primary actors were in world history. Pallottino defines the ‘orientalizing’ style
as “a particular, and in a certain sense final, aspect of the arts of the ancient
Near East,” while for the Italian peninsula, it is the “first chapter of Etruscan
art.”170 ‘Orientalization’ is the space in which the prime movers of history move
from East to West, leaving the East in a suspended antiquity until its modern
encounters with Europe; it is also the time when Italy makes its first entrance
onto the historical stage, consequently relegating all previously indigenous
culture primitive and unimportant. Pallottino describes the stages before and
after this transformation in Etruria in extremes: “In a short time the stagnant
backwater of Etruria was transformed into a high and wealthy civilization complete with great buildings, exquisite works of art of its own, as well as goods
imported from abroad on a large scale.”171 The arrival of older cultural models
from the East and eventually Greece, in many ways similar to the ripple effects
of Italian colonial experience in Africa, spurred economic growth and development in Etruria, making the ‘orientalizing’ period Italy’s critical first step
toward contributing to Classical Antiquity and eventually Western civilization.
The onset of history in Etruria, and therefore Italy, in the form of the alphabet
and the written word which arrive in this period combined with the appearance of eastern objects in Italy that could be tied to an absolute, scientifically
derived chronology masks the subtle enforcement of Western superiority in

168
169
170
171

Pallottino 1947, 159–60.
Pallottino 1965, 792.
Pallottino 1965, 786.
Pallottino, Dräyer, and Hürlimann 1955, 12.

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the creation of historical narrative behind a presumably factually determined,
objective façade.
One of the more entrenched and interpretatively problematic characteristics of Pallottino’s definition of ‘orientalization’ is the restriction of the goods
and those who used them to a pan-regional class of Mediterranean elites. Since
one of the first and most prominent examples of ‘orientalizing’ material in Italy
was the Regolini-Galassi tomb, it seemed logical to connect these and similar
objects of precious materials to the wealthiest individuals of society. Even as
more imported objects, from a diverse and greater number of contexts came to
light, for Pallottino, the elite base remained the core constituency of ‘orientalizing’ culture. As Pallottino explicitly defines the vast variety of objects of this
culture, he states that they have “one important aspect in common: they reflect
the taste and demand of an elite, be they Assyrian, Syrian, Cypriote, Greek, or
Etruscan.”172 This has subsequently created a circular argument by which all
material determined to be part of ‘orientalizing’ culture is brought within the
taste of the elite; therefore, anything that is determined to be ‘orientalizing’
inherently must be elite.173 Pallottino layers further levels of inference on the
political nature of these elites by describing the contrast in reception between
Greece, which is explicitly described as not having a monarchy, and Italy, in
which: “… (as in Assyria) they were the courts of minor barbarian princes
who desired to be buried with their treasures.”174 The use of the “prince” designation had now evolved beyond Ducati’s original adjectival use to one that
implies an actual system of government, and in this case, one that is being
used to explain the contextual differences between ‘orientalizing’ find spots in
Greece and in Italy. Since, in Pallottino’s evolutionary modeling, the ‘orientalizing’ period was the final phase before the coalescence of historic Etruria – a
land historically documented as being ruled by kings – it is natural that the
preceding phase would be envisioned as a world of princes. ‘Orientalization’
then came to encapsulate the arrival of historic, monarchic Etruria, and therefore an extremely important steppingstone on the evolutionary path toward
the eventual peak, the Roman Empire. The transition from an Italian culture
inspired by the East to one firmly grounded in the Republican ideals of the
Romans would not take place until the end of the ‘orientalizing’ period, when
Rome became a Republic in 509, and the Roman overthrow of the decadent,
tyrannical Etruscan kings from the city served as a founding act of Orientalism
within Roman civilization.
172
173
174

Pallottino 1965, 786.
Riva 2010, 42.
Pallottino 1965, 785.

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57

Pallottino’s idea of a transfer of cultural models from the East to the West
brings us to more contemporary interpretative frameworks for scholarship
on the ‘orientalizing’ period. There has been a greater emphasis on the active
selection of objects and practices by Italic peoples, which even Pallottino referenced in his descriptions of artistic styles, and on the general mixing and
hybridization of artistic forms from Greece and the East. The shift from stylistic transfer to cultural transfer required the identification of certain human
actions and practices that would then comprise what is now called ‘orientalization.’ It is quite telling that the same person who brought clarity to the confusing and seemingly endless debate on Etruscan origins, a favorite topic of
nineteenth-century nationalistic scholarship, in turn would create the processual engine by which civilization spread to the West and formed the foundations for European civilization. Orientalism lies at the very heart of why and
how this evolutionary process was thought to be necessary in the first place.
6

Recent Interpretations of Orientalizing and Orientalization

When looking at modern definitions of the ‘orientalizing’ period, we can
see that the broad outline of cultural change Pallottino initiated with his
1965 definition has now been filled in with an identification of the specific
actions, cultural practices, and more diverse actors that made up this phenomenon. Pallottino’s reorientation of the Etruscan origin problem toward
local Villanovan development (with some external stimulus) directed research
toward fuller explorations and explanations of these processes and particularly to an identification of exactly which developments should be attributed
to foreign input and their original source. This meant a shift from a focus on
the art historical details of objects, styles, and motifs to one that used the
detailed analysis of these materials for understanding the intricacies of human
interaction in the past, as well as how this interaction resulted in larger social
and cultural changes within Etruria. Such a reorientation fit within broader
trends in archaeological theory in the 1960s and 70s toward processual archaeology, although these ideas did not truly take hold in the Italian sphere until
the 1980s.175 The cultural changes that were believed to be part of the ‘orientalizing’ phenomenon were driven by an Etruscan elite seeking to be participants
in an “international style of luxury”176 achieved by employing both local and
foreign craftspeople. These two groups, aristocrats and artisans, became focal
175
176

Cuozzo and Guidi 2013, 14.
Pallottino 1965, 792.

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points as the agents of cultural change in the ‘orientalizing’ phenomenon, centering research on their actions and interactions abroad.
The current interpretation of ‘orientalization’ holds that the importation of
eastern objects and luxury goods implies the acceptance of an aristocratic way
of life taken from the eastern Mediterranean by Etruscan elites, which later
diffused throughout the entire Italian peninsula.177 Gradually, all imported
objects and those made of precious materials have been classified as ‘orientalizing’ goods, making the material definition of the period include nearly
the entire material culture repertoire of Etruria except non-painted impasto
and bucchero pottery, as well as some bronze objects with earlier Villanovan
precedents. As seen in previous sections, this expansive definition of ‘orientalizing’ goods developed from the broad original definitions of ‘orientalizing’
style put in place by Della Seta and Ducati. These materials are primarily eastern imported objects (following Ducati’s definition of l’arte orientalizzante più
antica), such as ivory, glass, faience, ostrich eggs, gold, silver, bronze, as well as
imported painted pottery, primarily from Corinth and Ionia (matching Conze’s
original orientalisirende and Ducati’s later phase of l’arte orientalizzante), and
architectural styles from Ionia and northern Syria. Each of these objects and
styles was employed by the already existing Etruscan aristocracy as a way to
further bolster their local power by showing their connections abroad, as well
as their inclusion in a larger network of Mediterranean-wide aristocratic culture, all of which were looking eastward toward the kingly courts and palaces
of the Near East.178 Through the presence of these goods, there is a further
implication that ideas, cosmologies, customs, and practices traveled alongside
these imported objects.179 Three of the most important practices transferred
by the craftsmen and traders who carried the eastern imported goods have
become core components of what now makes up the ‘orientalizing’ phenomenon: ritual banqueting, new symbols of aristocratic power and monarchy, and
a desire for the luxury and opulence of the East through the possession of exotica. The combination of these elements created a ‘princely way of life’ adopted
by Etruscan elites. The restriction of cultural practices ascribed to ‘orientalization’ to stereotypical aspects of Eastern royal courts showcases the Orientalism
still present in current interpretations. It also belies an understanding of
177
178
179

Bartoloni et al. 2000; Naso 2000c; D’Agostino 2006; Mandolesi and Sannibale 2012;
Sannibale 2013; Botto 2017; Maggiani 2017.
Rathje 1979; Cristofani and Martelli 1994; Ampolo 2000; Naso 2000c, 122; Torelli 2000b, 22;
Botto 2017, 603; Maggiani 2017, 546; Menichetti 2017.
Sannibale 2013, 100; Naso 2000c, 116; Botto 2017, 602; Burkert 1992, 6 for similar understanding in Greece.

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cultural change heavily influenced by modern European colonialism that sees
social transformation as taking place in an exclusively top-down manner.
6.1
Aristocratic Banquet
One of the most visible and materially evidenced social practices from the ‘orientalizing’ period is the aristocratic banquet. Although the banquet is most
strongly associated with the ‘orientalizing’ period, ceremonial eating and
drinking predates this phenomenon in local practice,180 and even imported
eastern forms of banqueting date prior to the height of the ‘orientalizing’
period in the seventh century.181 The banquet is represented by a large number of ceramic vessels and metalwares of the ‘orientalizing’ assemblage associated with ceremonial wine drinking and meat preparation, with many new
forms and objects coming from the Near East and Greece. The primary objects
associated with the banquet are the cauldron and tripod, iron spits and firedogs for roasting meat, large open-mouthed vessels for mixing wine and water,
and drinking vessels, as well as other metal and ceramic serving ware for food
consumption.182 In addition to these essential components of the banquet,
there were accessories to the feasting, such as couches made of precious materials like wood, ivory, and metal, whose presence is connected to banqueting
practices of Near Eastern courts.183 Our evidence for banqueting materials is
primarily made up of objects found in funerary assemblages or within depictions on tomb paintings or architectural terracottas, such as the Tomb of the
Leopards in Tarquinia or on the plaques from Murlo and Acquarossa.184
Due to the eastern origin of these practices and materials, their appearance
has been used to mark the arrival of formalized banqueting as conducted in
Near Eastern royal courts,185 along with Greek drinking practices in the form
of the symposion at a slightly later period,186 although both have been seen
as incorporating local Etruscan interpretations and accommodations.187 The
exact source of the influence in banqueting and drinking practices is complicated by the fact that Greek drinking was also influenced by Near Eastern
practices. Carolina López-Ruiz, however, highlights the ways in which the
specific funerary context of feasting expressed within Etruria points to closer
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187

Iaia 2006, 2007; Colivicchi 2017, 207.
Kistler 2017, 196.
Sannibale 2012; Rathje 2013. Riva 2010, chap. 6 for a contextual use of all of these objects.
Sannibale 2012; Rathje 2013; Colivicchi 2017, 209; Kistler 2017, 199.
Rystedt 1984; Rathje 2013.
Rathje 1990, 282 and 1991; Botto 2000, 2017.
Torelli 2000a, 148–49; D’Agostino 2006, 215–16, 2011, 35–36.
Rathje 1990, 1995, 2013, 824; Tuck 1994; Riva 2010; Sannibale 2013, 100.

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connections with the Phoenician practice and therefore to Phoenician transmission to Etruria.188 Hellenocentrism has emphasized later Greek drinking practices and imported vessels, preventing a greater acknowledgment of
the Phoenician role in this respect. Greater investigation of the active role
Phoenician agents played in the phenomenon of interconnection during this
period, something that the Orientalism embedded in the term ‘orientalizing’
has paradoxically downplayed, could lead to a greater understanding of the
diverse connections made in this period.
In recent scholarship there has been a focus on the ways in which the
Etruscans have adapted banqueting objects within their local context.189 These
approaches break free of emphasizing a singular moment of arrival (or two:
one Phoenician and one Greek as suggested by Ducati’s bifurcation) for funerary feasting and drinking practices, an interpretation that is the product of isolating this period as ‘orientalizing’ rather than situating cultural developments
within the diachronic span of Etruscan history. The practice of incorporating
commensality into funerary ritual can be traced earlier in Etruscan history to
the libations and small funerary meals seen in Villanovan biconical urns and
cups found in tombs.190 Research into such practices has pushed past earlier
‘orientalizing’ art historical methods that isolated imported objects as individual categories of study, either in an effort to limit the potential impact of
Eastern influence or because using the term ‘orientalizing’ has made imported
objects the sole focus of study for the period. There is an effort to investigate these materials and practices within local Etruscan contexts alongside
Etruscan wares made of impasto and later bucchero and in light of the diachronic history of commensality in the region. Such a framing enables scholars to see attributes adapted from Near Eastern and Greek banqueting and
feasting as increasing the elaboration and scale of existing practices in Etruria
rather than indicating the wholesale adoption of new cultural traits as colonial
models of ‘orientalizing’ have emphasized. This also gives space to consider
the Etruscan adaptations that were made to such banqueting and drinking
practices. For instance, the Phoenician practice of adding spices to the wine
was done through the use of a grater, following Euboean practices, rather
than utilizing a clay tripod as was done in the Phoenician world.191 The most
conspicuous Etruscan adaptations can be seen in the inclusion of women as
active participants in the drinking and banqueting, as opposed to the Greek
188
189
190
191

López-Ruiz 2021, 167–68.
Riva 2010; Kreindler 2015; Iaia 2016; Kistler 2017, 199.
Iaia 2016.
Kistler 2017, 199.

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practice of excluding all women except hetaerae.192 The largest adaptation that
the Etruscans made to the feast was materially in the incorporation of vessels
of their own creation, bucchero, which drew on Levantine ceramic forms and
decorative styles adapted from metalworking. These adaptations and modifications are easily lost when the framework of ‘orientalizing’ simply seeks
to highlight the acceptance of foreign objects and practices, focusing on the
imported additions without contextualizing them within the local materials
and practices.
The current interpretations of the Etruscan banquet present it as the central
arena for aristocratic display and elite gift-exchange during the ‘orientalizing’
period, which place it as one of the most important driving forces behind the
phenomenon of ‘orientalization.’193 The banquet is equated with the activity
of Near Eastern courts and the emulation of this, although with some local
variations, is seen as a common facet of the ‘orientalizing’ period throughout
the Mediterranean.194 This practice is presumably how the ‘orientalizing’ phenomenon spreads, hopping westward from indigenous aristocrat to aristocrat,
through a constantly sustained and universal competitive drive. This interpretation in part relies on a view of the acceptance of ‘orientalizing’ culture as
marking the arrival of history and civilization for Iron Age peoples who would
naturally vie to adopt such traits of ‘civilization.’ The reasons local elites, or
aspiring elites, would adopt banqueting as a central part of their funerary ritual
is taken for granted. Furthermore, the ways in which banqueting builds social
status and political power have been left unexplored. Recently, there have
been greater efforts to explicate the process by which the commensal politics
surrounding the banquet led to greater development of social hierarchy and
assertions of power within the proto-urban communities of Etruria.195 In part
this can be done by looking in greater detail at the manner of feasting that takes
place in Etruscan contexts, both in funerary and habitation contexts, whose
relatively smaller quantity of evidence by comparison to funerary contexts
has decreased the importance of feasting materials from settlements within
the ‘orientalizing’ discourse. To be succinct, not all feasts are made equal, and
more research can be conducted to categorize feasting types and scales that are
present within a singular community and across different communities within
Etruria.196 This would allow us to say more about differing feasting strategies
192
193
194
195
196

Bartoloni 2000, 275; Colonna 2000b, 37; Rathje 2013, 826.
Naso 2000a; Sannibale 2013, 100.
Dietler 1990, 2010 for one of the most prominent efforts to nuance our understanding of
the feast for this period.
Kistler 2017.
An example of such feasting categorization can be seen in Kassabaum 2019.

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within individual communities and between different Etruscan communities, enabling a greater degree of nuance for discussing the ramifications of an
Etruria increasingly connected with the Mediterranean world.
Beyond looking at variations in the scale and style of feasting, we may be
able to say more about non-elite members of society if we examine examples
of feasting equipment beyond those tombs that display the greatest number
and elaboration of materials. These representations of banquets are often dismissed as poor imitations of elite banquets, studied more for the elements that
they lack rather than the elements of the banquet that are included. If we were
instead to try to build an understanding of their selective use of feasting items,
noting which items were purposefully included, we may be able to include a
segment of society in the historical narrative that has heretofore been omitted
from discussion of the elite-centric ‘orientalizing’ period.
Focusing more on the mechanics behind feasting rather than simply emphasizing the display of power that these practices articulate would allow scholars
to unite more lines of evidence surrounding feasting, such as paleobotany, faunal evidence, and survey archaeology, along with the ceramic evidence from
settlement data that is not often put into dialogue with funerary remains. This
would allow us to ask questions such as whether the increased importance of
feasting during this period had larger economic implications that may have
affected subsistence patterns, land use, and land tenure.197 Combining these
changes with the feasting evidence from settlements and funerary displays will
provide a more holistic picture of the ramifications of increased connectivity
during the early first millennium in Etruria.
In these interpretations of the aristocratic banquet, we see many of
the issues present in earlier definitions of ‘orientalizing.’ The influence of
Near Eastern banqueting practices is often discussed in terms of exoticism,
excess, and ostentation.198 This has framed the Etruscans who have adopted
these practices as representatives of eastern luxury on the Italian peninsula.
Earlier interpretations that emphasized the wholesale adoption of both Near
Eastern and Greek banqueting practices were influenced by the colonialist
understandings of cultural transferal discussed above, but there is increasingly greater nuance in discussing Etruscan adoption and adaptation of these
objects and practices. The division between Near Eastern and Greek banqueting practices mimics the Orientalist division created by Ducati, but there is
beginning to be greater understanding that such a division is artificial.199 Such
197
198
199

Trentecoste 2020.
Colivicchi 2017, 208; Kistler 2017, 203.
Colivicchi 2017, 208.

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an acknowledgement will help to foreground the study of Phoenician contributions to Etruscan practices, as well as to highlight the continuity of Etruscan
practices of commensality from earlier periods. By also adding the perspective
of non-elite participation in feasting as well as the larger economic effects of
increased feasting practices, the increased importance and visibility of banqueting practices during this period will be able to be better contextualized
within Etruscan society.
6.2
Monarchy
The arrival of a new ideology and display of power comprises another element
of the ‘orientalizing’ phenomenon in Etruria. In current understandings of
‘orientalizing’ objects, nearly all materials associated with the ‘orientalizing’
period have been classified as prestige goods, embodied with the task of communicating status and legitimacy to their holders.200 There are specific objects
that are more closely tied with how authority has been displayed within Near
Eastern and Egyptian courts and, therefore, are more explicitly connected with
a new, more institutionalized form of power: monarchy. These items include
the scepter/mace/distaff, chariot, throne, staff or lituus, and flabellum (fan),
each of which has been found within funerary contexts, and primarily in socalled ‘princely’ tombs.201 The iconographic similarities and material connections with symbols of monarchy in the East has led to an interpretation of a
direct transferal of a monarchic political structure to Etruria.202 This once
again places colonialist assumptions of the wholesale transfer of cultural
institutions alongside imported objects, but even with these royal symbols of
power, Etruscan elites are only ascribed the secondary role of ‘princes’ rather
than kings. These imported objects and symbols of power are particularly
important markers historically since the Etruscans are said to have handed
down many of them to the Romans who adopted them as symbols of power.
In the creation of a teleological history, the assumption of the arrival
of Eastern monarchy in Etruria along with eastern objects serves two purposes: the first is to provide the external, evolutionary catalyst toward the
eventual development of the Etruscan Archaic kingship known from later
literary and epigraphic sources, and the second, as was stated previously, is
to establish the Etruscans as the Easternized, despotic royal counterpoint to
200
201
202

Torelli 1985, 18.
Martelli 1995; Winther 1997; Delpino and Bartoloni 2000, 223–24; Naso 2000c, 111; Botto
2017, 602.
Torelli 2000a, 145; Gras 2000a, 20; Menichetti 2000, 206–207; Sannibale 2013, 102; Botto
2017, 602.

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the later Republican values of the Romans. In this way the Etruscans became
Orientalized to serve as the Eastern foil for the establishment of Rome, the
protagonist in the historic narrative of Western civilization.
Determining forms of government during this period of Etruscan history
is particularly difficult since there is no direct evidence, with only later literary sources citing the presence of kings in Rome and southern Etruria during
the Archaic period. The assumption of monarchal power structures stretching
back into the ‘orientalizing’ period is based on the presence of the symbols of
power mentioned earlier along with the sheer wealth of grave goods in tombs,
all of which are meant to display luxury and prestige in the model of Near
Eastern royal courts.203 While this archaeological evidence provides some signs
that may indicate the presence of monarchy in the region, the lack of certainty
within the archaeological record calls for caution.204 This hesitancy seems to
be behind the wide-spread use of the term ‘princely’ in scholarship, first introduced by Ducati, implicitly framing Etruria as a monarchy-in-training, relying
on an evolutionary narrative to fill in the interpretative gaps, and turning the
princely ‘orientalizing’ period into the necessary intermediary step between
Iron Age chiefdoms and Archaic kings.205
Rather than relying on a term like ‘princely,’ we should interrogate whether
we can use these archaeological markers to identify the actual presence of
monarchy within Etruria during this period. This means looking at these symbols contextually alongside earlier long-standing symbols of power within each
community. Social hierarchy was well developed in Etruria prior to this period,
so it is important to contextualize imported prestige goods alongside existing
markers of authority. Do those utilizing these imported objects also employ
earlier existing symbols of power? Such knowledge may help us understand
whether these imported symbols were utilized by those in control of existing
power structures or rather were employed by new groups seeking to establish
themselves with new traditions. In addition to contextualized imported symbols of power within individual sites, there needs to be greater effort to understand the geographic variability in the use of these symbols. Because there
can be a large number of Near Eastern symbols of power present at each site206
and since there are often multiple elaborate wealthy tombs within individual
communities, greater effort needs to be given to distinguishing the symbols
203
204
205
206

Tagliamonte 2017, 123.
Naso 2017c, 878–79 includes a similar cautionary note.
Tagliamonte 2017.
For instance, the eleven thrones found in Verucchio dating to between 750–650 or the
model bronze thrones found in Chiusi, Naso 2017c, 879 citing von Eles and Baldelli 2017
and Minetti 2004, 446–49.

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of power utilized by specific Etruscan cities over time on a contextual basis.
Monarchic symbols and other elements of power should be analyzed between
different Etruscan and Latin cities in order to understand regional differentiation in representation, adoption, and adaptation. The authority of royal
symbols of power has been assumed to be universal and unchanging from the
Near Eastern context to the Etruscan context, but such an assumption needs
to be interrogated.
As with banqueting, these symbols of power need to be interpreted alongside broader types of evidence for changes in settlement patterns, economic
developments, and other shifts in society that we would expect to accompany
the adoption of a new form of government. While these imported objects may
connote Near Eastern kingship, their use by Etruscan rulers was in a distinctly
different context. Near Eastern rulers employed these symbols as a means
of control for large and dispersed territorial states whereas Etruscan cities
appeared at this time to be ruled individually as city-states. While there may be
greater similarities between Etruscan forms of rule and the Phoenicians who
likely transmitted these items, these differences in administration need to be
accounted for in interpretations of the Etruscan use of these symbols and the
establishment of a new political structure. Moreover, these symbols need to
be incorporated alongside studies that look at urban development, changes in
settlement patterns, and other economic changes – all topics that have been
important mainstays of Etruscology – to understand the broader implications
of changes in social organization. Greater interaction and trade across the
Mediterranean created winners and losers within the existing economic and
social hierarchy that should be visible and that can be studied beyond simply
focusing on whether we can verify the presence of monarchy. Such interconnected studies across different fields within Etruscology will help to contextualize the ramifications of imported symbols and political changes that are
intertwined with Mediterranean trade across a broad span of society.
6.3
Luxury
One of the final significant factors of cultural change assumed to be tied to
the ‘orientalizing’ period is the development of a taste for luxury among the
Etruscan aristocracy.207 Although local development of social hierarchy had
already established elite groups from the Bronze Age onward, the ‘orientalizing’ period is seen as bringing new and more complex opportunities for social
differentiation among the elite through a more elaborate and extensive suite of
material culture. This taste for luxury established an inherent Etruscan desire
207

Colonna 2000a, 55, 2000b, 37; Menichetti 2000, 210.

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for the acquisition of all the objects, customs, and ideologies discussed above.
Therefore, even if Eastern practices were not fully adopted, there is a consistent
assumption that Etruscan elites enviously emulated the pomp and ceremony
of Near Eastern courts without further explanation as to why these materials and practices were considered appealing.208 These Eastern objects, styles,
and customs are assumed to be inherently appealing in Etruria and wherever
else they are traded in the Mediterranean, and therefore, the development of a
taste for them is seen as both natural and a sign of civilizational progress. This
is in large part because ‘orientalizing’ culture has this historiographic tradition
of being interpreted as a marker of civilization and, therefore, something all
peoples would naturally strive to adopt. Such an assumption does not account
for differences in concepts of value between different communities. Moving
away from the framework of ‘orientalizing’ would open these value systems
to further investigation, forcing scholarship to ask why certain imported
objects and materials were adopted by the Etruscans.209 Without exploring
these ancient systems of value further, the conception of Etruscan adoption of
Eastern objects and practices as being inherently a marker of a taste for luxury
ascribes a modern Orientalist view of the value of Eastern exotica within a
Western context.
The idea of tryphe (luxury) that is specifically attributed to the Etruscans
was formed based on literary accounts from Greek and Roman authors such
as Theopompus, Alkimos, Heraclides Ponticus, Timaeus, and Posidonius as a
way of moralistically ‘othering’ them.210 Modern acceptance of such a biased
framing of the ‘other’ gives credence to a colonialist characterization of the
Etruscans. Giovanni Colonna explicitly links this literary attitude toward the
Etruscans with the material culture of the ‘orientalizing’ period:
the roots of the Greek idea of tryphe lie in what is known as habrosyne,
that is, the Etruscan aristocracy’s urge to emulate the refined customs
and high living standards of Ionian stamp (or, more generically, of
Graeco-Oriental origin), a lifestyle they pursued from the days of the lavish Orientalizing culture of the seventh century.211

208
209
210
211

Briquel 2000, 45; Naso 2000c, 122; Sannibale 2013, 99.
The concept of value has been a useful avenue for research into the use of eastern imported
objects in Bronze Age Greece, see Voutsaki 1995; van Wijngaarden 1999; Feldman 2006;
Legarra Herrero 2011. For use of the concept of value within Archaic Etruria, see Riva 2017.
Colonna 2000b, 37.
Colonna 2000b, 37.

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The Orientalist equation of lavish decadence with the East has been transferred to the Etruscans through the material evidence of the ‘orientalizing’
period, and just as in the case of monarchy, it is done in order to establish a
foil to the Western ideals embodied in the Roman Republic, both by ancient
writers and modern scholars. This quotation also lays bare the double standard
that is attributed to the Etruscans’ acceptance of objects and ideas from the
Eastern Mediterranean: what is considered “refined customs and high living
standards” in Ionia is derided as lavish within the Etruscan context. In Etruria,
the basic elements of civilization and society become items of luxury.
Along with the negative connotations of luxury, the formation of an
Etruscan taste for Eastern goods was thought to set in motion another critical component of more ephemeral exchange: technological knowledge and
skilled craftspeople. The appearance of a number of new technologies have
been connected with the cultural exchange of the ‘orientalizing’ period: wheelturned, refined, and slipped pottery, more precise ceramic firing techniques,
goldsmithing techniques of filigree and granulation, and perhaps above all
writing.212 The new needs and desires of the Etruscan aristocracy created a
demand for closer, more local production of such luxury goods, meaning that
the necessary technology and skills needed to be transferred through teaching, local imitation, and the actual immigration of eastern craftspeople into
Etruria.213 The full-scale migration and eastern origin for the Etruscans first
connected with the ‘orientalizing’ period by Brizio has been replaced by a partial migration of craftspeople instead.214 Associating the changes in material
culture and society during this period to the diffusion of eastern craftspeople
within Etruria oversimplifies the spread of knowledge and technology for a
time in which we have evidence for a wide span of mobilities and types of trade.
There are many different ways in which this knowledge could be transferred
from one group to another, and teasing out the nuances of this transfer, place
by place, would further our understanding of the nature of interaction during
this period. In addition to their role in diffusing ‘orientalizing’ art and culture
within Etruria, these mobile craftsmen (they are most frequently assumed to
212
213
214

Cristofani 1978a; Torelli 1981, 70, 2000c; Colonna 2000a, 58; Sassatelli 2000; Torelli 2000c;
Riva 2010, 59–60; Micozzi 2017b.
Cristofani 1978a, 35; Botto 2002, 2012, 2017; Ridgway 2002; Sannibale 2013, 2016; Markoe
2015; Heyne 2019.
Although not explored in this work, each of the authors discussed in this historiography
could be examined for how they consider both itinerant craftspeople and the method of
knowledge transfer between peoples. While an early author like Winckelmann is eager
to deny or at least downplay the transferal of artistic knowledge between cultures, later
authors discuss a variety of mechanisms for such a transfer.

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have been male) have become another element of the ‘orientalizing’ cultural
package that Etruscan elites consume, in a similar way to the imported objects
that are buried with them in their tombs. Further, skilled artisans carried with
them the critical technologies and abilities needed not only to satisfy the consumptive desires of Etruscan elites but also some of the critical components
for establishing an urban civilization: craft specialization and organized craft
production, writing, and presumably a more complete understanding of how
each of these was meant to be used. These craftsmen then figure as the primary conduit for the transfer of ‘civilization’ that has been historically linked
to the concept of ‘orientalizing.’
The interpretation of the role of these itinerant craftsmen must be balanced
between attributing all artistic and technological change to the migration of
foreign peoples, an interpretation which would remove the agency and ingenuity of local Etruscans, and dismissing the presence of foreign craftspeople,
a denial of individual migration during a period of high interconnectivity. As
López-Ruiz suggests we should actively look for the presence of Phoenician
craftspeople living within Etruria by looking for distinct sets of Phoenician
material culture and practices that would help identify them. This means looking beyond whether objects categorized as ‘orientalizing’ can be ascribed to a
Phoenician hand or to an Etruscan imitation of the style and delving into settlement and burial data for the identification of immigrant craftspeople based
on larger cultural traits, as well as possibly isotopic data if available. Such an
investigation might also make it possible to understand the extent to which
there are geographic differences in the settlement of itinerant craftspeople and
to determine whether such settlement maps onto pre-existing distributions of
economic resources or other power dynamics. Moreover, the exclusive focus
on identifying either Phoenician or Greek itinerant craftspeople artificially
narrows the mobility of peoples in the ancient Mediterranean for this period,
excluding those Mediterranean peoples who may have migrated from beyond
these two groups. Breaking free of the ‘orientalizing’ framework would allow
us to look for other itinerant craftspeople from the western Mediterranean and
central Europe who may have been overlooked in this East–West divide.215
6.4
The Colonialist Transfer of a ‘Princely’ Way of Life
The combination of these three fundamental aspects – the banquet, monarchy, and luxury tastes – composes the ‘Eastern lifestyle’ at the heart of the
215

For instance, Iaia (2005, 2007) has shown that the Stillfried-type tazza in Iron Age
tombs in Etruria provides evidence for itinerant craftsmen coming from the Carpathian
Mountains.

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modern interpretation of the ‘orientalizing’ period. From this perspective, it is
not simply that eastern objects and motifs arrived on the Tyrrhenian shore, but
rather that entire lifestyles, customs, technologies, and ideologies were transferred from East to West, comprising a complete ‘way of life.’216 This shift from
earlier art historical approaches rightly acknowledges that the appearance of
new objects and iconography has broader implications than simply adding to
the artistic and material culture repertoire or marking the actual migration
of people as earlier thought. When people of different lifestyles and experiences come into contact with each other, the worldview and often the material culture of all people involved will be changed, and although in the case
of the Etruscans we have primarily objects as the fragmentary manifestation
of these transformations, we must look to a further explanation of the immaterial changes that took place as well. And while the Etruscan ‘orientalizing’
period has not recently been explicitly called or discussed as a ‘colonial’ situation (since no evidence has been found for large permanent settlements of
foreign peoples within Etruria), the way in which the phenomenon of cultural
change in the eighth and seventh centuries has been approached, nonetheless,
is from a colonialist perspective. As has been outlined, this colonial framework
has been associated with the term ‘orientalizing’ from Winckelmann’s belief
that changes in Etruscan art were brought about by Greek colonies in Etruria
to Pallottino’s more explicit connection between modern Italian colonial practice and the social changes of Etruscan ‘orientalization.’ The colonialist perspective has been especially prevalent in the belief that entire ways of life were
adopted from the eastern Mediterranean without changes in value or with
minimal adaptations. Since applications of a colonialist perspective have primarily been implicit in the outcomes and interpretations of ‘orientalization’ in
Etruria, the framework for understanding this process of cultural interaction
has until recently remained relatively uncritiqued.217
Besides the colonial undercurrents outlined in the historiography above,
there are a number of ways in which scholarship on the ‘orientalizing’ period
has been conceived of and explained through an underlying colonialist framework. As was the case in many colonial situations, history was written by the
non-indigenous groups, in this case Greek and Roman authors, and often even
by those at a chronological remove from the actual period of cultural interaction. Demaratus of Corinth, for instance, is one of the most prominent
stock characters from Graeco-Roman literature symbolizing a literary figure
who exemplifies the cultural changes of the ‘orientalizing’ period in Etruria.
216
217

Riva 2010, 42; Colivicchi 2017, 208; Naso 2017c.
Riva and Vella 2006a; Izzet 2007b; Riva 2010.

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Demaratus emphasizes the importance and primacy of Greek contributions
and agency within the ‘orientalizing’ period. Particularly after Pallottino
refuted the claim of the eastern origins of the Etruscans, there was a shift to
adding emphasis to Greek contributions at the expense of eastern elements.
As a Corinthian exile who moved to Tarquinia in the middle of the seventh
century, Demaratus brought with him his own extensive wealth (which aided
him in marrying the daughter of the ruler of Tarquinia), the technique of
writing, and advanced craftspeople skilled in painting and the plastic arts.218
Demaratus thus served both Roman historians and modern scholars as the
explanatory conduit for many important aspects that needed to be transferred
from Greece to Etruria and later Rome. His journey to Etruria, and then his
son’s later role as the fifth legendary king of Rome, created the ideal narrative for ancient sources in the same way that he became the later model for
a more Hellenocentric understanding of cultural progress and advancement
in the ‘orientalizing’ period.219 This encroachment of Hellenic influence into
earlier time periods has not only served to obscure the Phoenician and other
Eastern influences, whose written sources are not as frequently preserved for
this region and period, but it privileges the Greeks, who are both more literarily
prominent and more directly tied to Western identity formation.
The lack of an explicit colonialist situation in the definition of Etruscan
‘orientalization’ has made it easier to deny the impact of colonial thought in
the study of these cultural interactions. In particular, the art historical roots
of the study of the ‘orientalizing’ phenomenon have led to the basic assumption that eastern imports were used in Etruria just as these objects had originally been used in their initial context.220 Objects used in Near Eastern courts
are considered to have been used not just by similar social classes of Etruscan
aristocrats and kings but with similar iconographic interpretations and in connection with Eastern ideologies and practices.221 This assumption has led to
numerous studies whose foundations are built on a detailed examination of a
single class of objects and its iconographic motifs, followed by a survey of comparanda within the eastern Mediterranean employed to understand the use of
the object or the meaning of a particular iconographic element.222 Such studies can provide an understanding of the geographic distribution of interconnectivity within Etruria, but they need to be taken further with a contextual
218
219
220
221
222

Livy 1.34; Plin. HN. 35.5; Strabo 5.2.2; Tac. Ann. 11.14.
See López-Ruiz (2021) for a further discussion of the privileging of Greek and Roman
sources (25–27) as well as the Hellenocentric role played by Demaratus (165, 241).
Strom 1971; Rathje 1979; Sannibale 2013.
Botto 2017, 602.
Brown 1960; Szilagyi 1992, 1998; Sciacca 2005.

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look at how each of these particular material types fit into the material culture
and social organization of each Etruscan community in which they are used.
Investigating the local cultural context within which these objects were
being used and transformed requires a detailed diachronic look at material
culture and practices within each settlement before, during, and after these
two centuries of heightened connectivity. This means that any contextual analysis must stretch beyond the two centuries typically indicated by the term ‘orientalizing.’ The function of imported objects cannot be assumed within each
individual Etruscan community, much less between Etruria and Phoenicia,
Greece, or other Near Eastern contexts. The meaning and purpose of imported
objects is not something packaged alongside the goods themselves, and even if
this were the case, it would not guarantee that the Etruscan use would directly
coincide with these instructions. The reason that the meaning and use of these
imported objects is assumed not to have changed is because these Eastern elements, particularly after they have been transformed through Greek hands,
are thought to be further along an evolutionary scale of social advancement,
making the acceptance of these new goods a natural reaction that does not
require further explanation, replicating interpretations of colonial encounters
framed in earlier scholarship. This means that there has been limited exploration of possible reinterpretation or resistance to these objects and their associated social changes or a consideration of the disrupting aspects brought about
by these changes. How did these imported objects create winners and losers
within Etruscan political, economic, and social structures, and how does the
use of these items map onto earlier structures that were already in existence?
What kinds of imported objects and practices did not find resonance within
Etruscan culture? Furthermore, changes associated with ‘orientalizing’ culture have been viewed as a totalizing shift in Etruscan culture, but there are
certainly elements of earlier practices that continue to be important within
the Etruscan mindset. Greater study of these continuities, the things that the
Etruscans hold on to, in the face of contact and change can highlight the types
of values that are especially important to an Etruscan way of life at this time.
Nonetheless, there are certain common issues with colonialist approaches
that recent interpretations of ‘orientalizing’ Etruria have resolved. Some of the
first interpretations of the period placed Etruria as the supplier of raw materials, particularly metals, for more established civilizations such as Assyria, and
as the receiver of their advanced art and culture.223 This framework adopted a
world-systems view of this period, centering the Assyrian empire as the extractor of raw materials and supplier of finished luxury products for the peripheral
223

Sherratt and Sherratt 1993.

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regions such as Etruria. Since more available information has pointed to the
multi-directionality of long-distance trade throughout the Mediterranean,
it has been recognized that Etruria also exported bucchero and fine bronze
objects to southern France, Cyprus, and Greece, maintained long-standing
contacts with Sardinia, and had connections with Phoenician settlements in
Sardinia, Sicily, and at Carthage, showing that it is not simply an extractive
region for Eastern powers.224 Etruria was not merely a receiver of advanced
Eastern culture but was an equal participant in the lively trade of the early
first-millennium Mediterranean. The ‘orientalizing’ framework artificially constricted our conception of trade in the period to an East–West axis, but without
this Orientalist structure, we are able to highlight the wide variety of interconnections that are at play in the beginning of the first millennium.
In more recent scholarship the Etruscans are not portrayed as passively
accepting the ‘orientalizing’ suite of goods and way of life, but rather, most
current interpretations maintain that the Etruscan elite were actively participating in a Mediterranean-wide aristocratic culture, choosing and modifying
particular objects, styles, imagery, and customs in order to be able to interact
with an expanding group of foreign aristocratic peers.225 Although Etruscan
elites are portrayed as active in this role, unfortunately the previous historical
development and understanding of ‘orientalizing’ necessitates that, no matter the nuances that can be observed in the process of cultural transformation, the assumed end result – the full development of Etruscan civilization
and its later influence on Western European culture – has remained the same.
By calling this culture ‘orientalizing’ or framing the changes associated with
it as ‘orientalization,’ an Eastern result for Etruscan culture is permanently
inscribed in the study. While recent scholarship might be able to identify certain nuances, points of departure, or other divergences in the ways in which
Etruscans reacted to imported objects and increased trade during this period,
these details will always be subsumed within an ‘orientalizing’ result whose
interpretation cannot be altered or refined. This is because ‘orientalizing’ is not
simply a neutral definitional term; as I have outlined above, it is a theoretical
model for understanding the adoption of Eastern traits within Western civilization. Therefore, the end point of the evolutionary development is always
the same, and any nuances in interpretations of interconnectivity in the
period have been limited to a superficial impact and are folded into the traditional assumptions about ‘orientalization’ without any substantial changes to
the outcome.
224
225

Gras 2000b, 98; Dietler 2010, 94–104; Sannibale 2013, 100; Bellelli 2014, 93; Botto 2017.
Cristofani 1978a, 42; Naso 2000c, 122; Malkin 2002; Hodos 2020, 159.

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Such a colonialist outlook in scholarship has resulted in a diffusionist interpretation of the spread of ‘Eastern lifestyles’ to Etruria and subsequently the
other regions of Italy, particularly those areas that were not in direct contact
with Greek colonies. For regions such as Umbria, Abruzzo, the Veneto, and
Marche, the Etruscans serve as the colonizing agent, spreading the Eastern aristocratic way of life that they themselves had just previously assimilated. Along
with the explicit interpretation that Etruscans transmitted the ‘orientalizing’
lifestyle to the rest of peninsular Italy,226 the use of terms such as ‘princely,’
‘king,’ and ‘monarchy’ to describe ‘orientalizing’ burials in these inland regions
shows an implicit diffusionist and evolutionary perspective. The interpretation of the Etruscan ‘orientalizing’ period is not simply limited geographically
to the land between the Tiber and Arno rivers, or even to the often-discussed
Etruscan colonial settlements, but rather it has been applied to all areas and
sites in Italy that have any material signs of ‘orientalizing’ art, imports, objects,
or practices. In part, the primacy in agency given to the Etruscans on the Italian
peninsula can be attributed to the nationalist framework that so strongly influenced the creation and interpretation of ‘orientalizing’ discussed earlier in this
historiography. Looking in greater depth at how different Iron Age peoples
within Italy reacted to increased contact with Mediterranean peoples and cultures within the early first millennium could highlight the social variability
and differential development of Iron Age groups.227 By assuming the same outcome for regions outside of Etruria, we miss the ways in which, for instance,
more inland and remote regions show greater continuity and adherence to tradition in the face of Mediterranean-wide trends.228 The categorization of the
period as ‘orientalizing’ places greater emphasis on the importation of eastern
objects to the Italian peninsula and overshadows the concomitant increase in
trade between different Iron Age groups in Italy at the time. The subsequent
local adaptations of imported materials and the regional exchanges that are
made between groups like the Etruscans, Latins, Faliscans, Capenates, Sabines,
and others are also worth further investigation.
Along with these diffusionist perspectives on the ‘orientalizing’ period, one
of the other biases that does the greatest damage to a fuller understanding of
cultural interaction among central Italic communities in the eighth and seventh centuries is the exclusionary elite focus. Since the broader understanding
of ‘orientalization’ in the Mediterranean has been that of mutual aristocratic
226
227
228

Bradley 2000, 97; Naso 2000b, 96, 2000c, 122; Colivicchi and Zaccagnino 2008, 11; Micozzi
2017a.
See Nowlin 2016 for an example of such an exploration within the Abruzzo region.
Nowlin forthcoming.

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emulation of Eastern lifestyles through an assemblage of imported luxury
goods, the only active participants are by necessity the elites and possibly
the artisans working under their direction, who lacked their own individual
agency. Diffusion of the cultural impacts of the ‘orientalizing’ period in this
case is distributed not just geographically from Etruria inward but socially,
from the top down, through the much-emphasized more complex hierarchical
organization of society that developed in this period. It is undeniable that the
first appearance of goods associated with the ‘orientalizing’ period is seen in
the wealthiest graves within Tyrrhenian coastal centers, tombs which served
as chronological boundaries for the earliest definitions of the ‘orientalizing’
period. So much attention has been paid to these rare and extravagant burials that are typically characterized by the possession of all components, practices, and materials characteristic of the ‘orientalizing’ phenomenon that the
more scattered and isolated appearance of imported objects or related materials within smaller burials tends to be viewed as lower-class imitation and
deficient forms of emulation. Social relations, even in a time of community
reorganization within a more discrete urban form, are therefore conceived of
in a strict pyramid of social hierarchy, with the imported luxury goods trickling through society at the discretion of the upper classes, making the lower
classes of Etruria simply another location for the diffusion of ‘orientalizing’
culture. Removing the reductive framework of ‘orientalizing’ would allow us to
ask questions of the possible differential of use of these objects and practices
between classes and question how the introduction of new objects, ideologies,
and value systems may have upset the pre-existing social hierarchy. The totalizing nature of what Riva has critically called a “culture of princes” has led to
defining two centuries of Etruscan history by the actions of the smallest segment of society alone, excluding the vast majority of the population.
There are intriguing possibilities of research into the use of imported objects
across the lines of age and gender that would provide nuance to the discussion
of elite ‘orientalizing’ culture. As has been noted, many of these imported goods
appear in the graves of women within central Italy.229 In the case of more local
imports indicative of regional contact, the presence of imported objects has
been seen as possible evidence for intra-community marriages,230 but such
interpretations have not been suggested for the presence of imported eastern objects within female tombs. A greater investigation of the intersection of
gender and power would expand interpretations beyond the use of imported

229
230

Fulminante 2019, 43.
Nijboer 2011; Kremer 2016.

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objects as a sign of connections abroad.231 The same research is increasingly
possible for the use of imported objects in subadult burials, as more intact
tombs are excavated and published from central Italy.
6.5
Postcolonial Interpretations
In light of these problems of colonial and diffusionist approaches toward an
elite-focused, ‘orientalizing’ culture, the most productive research on this
period of interaction during the Italian Iron Age has been located in a critical
assessment of standard terminology and especially in the recent postcolonial
turn, a trend that has been occurring more broadly within the field of archaeology for the last thirty years.232 The very structure of this historiography is
informed by the postcolonial critique as it seeks to dissect the intersection of
knowledge and power that has created the discourse surrounding ‘orientalizing.’ Postcolonial archaeology seeks to question and destabilize stereotypes
and binaries as a means for understanding past societies, something which
is certainly a key structuring principle for studies of ‘orientalizing’ in Etruria.
This requires acknowledging that identities are fluid and socially constructed
rather than fixed and unchanging, particularly in the context of cultural
exchange. Postcolonial approaches focus on the ways in which objects and
practices can change, adapt, and be recombined with local and other foreign
influences to create entirely new entities. In this respect, concepts of hybridity and hybrid practices have been fundamental for understanding this process and have been particularly influential in archaeological interpretations.233
This understanding requires acknowledging that it is possible for objects and
practices to change their meaning and value when they enter a new cultural
context. It is critical to examine these materials in their local context in light
of local traditions.
Postcolonial approaches have been broadly used for investigating instances
of cultural interaction within the early Mediterranean Iron Age, but they are
yet to gain significant traction within Etruscology. This is in part due to the
larger trend within Etruscology to deny or completely reject the influence of
modern concepts and theory on the study of the Etruscans.234 In scholarship
on Italy and the surrounding islands during this period, focus has shifted from
looking eastward to the original homes of the objects and motifs that have
231
232
233
234

Riva 2010, 88–94 fruitfully looks at the intersection of gender and symbols of power.
Thomas 1991; van Dommelen 1998, 2011; Gosden 2004; Dietler 2010; Lydon and Rizvi 2010.
van Dommelen 1997, 2006; Antonaccio 2003; Feldman 2006; Vives-Ferrándiz 2008; Hodos
2010; Papalexandrou 2010; Vella 2010; Stockhammer 2013; Balco 2018. For a critique of the
widespread application of hybridity, see Pappa 2013.
Riva 2020.

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been described as ‘orientalizing,’ and even away from the amorphous debate as
to who exactly was involved in the process of transport and exchange,235 and
instead looking toward the peoples who used these imported goods within
Italy and how they incorporated these new objects, themes, and customs into
their own, pre-existing material culture and local context. These approaches
have been highlighted in the edited volume, Debating Orientalization, which
is one of the only Mediterranean-wide critical assessments of both the term
‘orientalization’ and the ways in which it has been studied throughout the
countries ringing the Mediterranean Sea.236 This volume does not seek to
undermine the copious amounts of material evidence for a heightened period
of cultural interaction and trade throughout the Mediterranean in the first half
of the first millennium. Nor is there a shift to a nativist perspective that denies
any impact of increased connectivity on local sets of material culture. Rather,
the chapters included in the volume seek to shift both the perspective and the
types of questions that are asked of the material. As Purcell frames the point:
“Why an Etruscan in the Tyrrhenian thought alphabetic writing a useful thing
to learn is a more important question than where the person who taught the
person who taught him learned it from.”237
Within Etruscan studies, the reassessment of the ‘orientalizing’ period has
remained relatively limited, with only recent critical evaluation of the terminology used to describe the period (orientalizzante) or the category of tombs
(principesche).238 Critical components of the ‘orientalizing’ way of life, such as
the presence of monarchy in the eighth through sixth centuries, has been questioned by scholars such as Christopher Smith, who discursively examined the
existence of Etruscan and later Roman kings through a critique of the literary
235

236
237
238

The Phoenician (a term used by Greeks, Romans, and modern scholars to identify peoples
based on linguistic, epigraphic, and cultural grounds in the Levant and in areas of colonial
or diasporic movement) role within the ‘orientalizing’ period has long been dismissed or
down-played, but in recent years their contribution to the Mediterranean-wide style of
the eighth and seventh centuries and their role in the transmission of these objects, particularly in the western Mediterranean, has been highlighted Aubet 2001; Hodos 2006;
Vella 2014; Quinn and Vella 2018; Doak and López-Ruiz 2019; Feldman 2019; López-Ruiz
2021. In the case of interactions with the Etruscans, the Phoenician role as well as the
earliest “trinkets” associated with their phase of exchange has been reduced to something
of a false-start for the real ‘orientalizing’ period set in motion by the arrival of Greek colonists and traders. López-Ruiz (2021, 44–62) provides an excellent summation of all of the
complicating factors that have reduced or limited the perceived Phoenician role in the
exchange networks of the early first millennium.
Riva and Vella 2006b.
Purcell 2006, 24.
Fulminante 2003; Riva 2006, 2010; Riva and Vella 2006a; Isayev 2007, 8.

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and archaeological sources.239 Such a review of basic assumptions, of whether
or not we have evidence for actual kingship or simply a well-developed aristocracy, is a vital part of dissecting the “culture of princes” associated with the ‘orientalizing’ period. Accompanying such a reevaluation of monarchy is Corinna
Riva’s archaeological reassessment of how Etruscan elites used the expanded
material culture of the early first millennium as a means of institutionalizing
their own political authority through a continuity of funerary ritual and display
rather than asserting a new ideology of monarchy transferred to them from the
East.240 This work is grounded in placing the ‘orientalizing’ period within its
broader chronological context, evaluating preexisting symbols of power such
as weaponry, technological appropriation, and monumental, collective burials
through the longue durée in order to belay the assumption of a sudden change
in aristocratic ideology. Francesca Fulminante has sought to explore the sociopolitical developments at the heart of how settlements in central Italy gained
in size and complexity from the Bronze Age until the Archaic period. She has
explored the importance of age and gender in the consumption of eastern
imports, noting their prominence in female and infant burials in Latium vetus.241
On a regional scale, she has employed formal network analysis to reject the
notion that urbanism was another concept that was transported to central
Italy from the East,242 focusing instead on the local dynamics of communication between central Italic settlements as a driver for change.243
A contextual approach to particular object types, motifs, or cultural phenomena has become one of the most prominent new avenues for research on interaction in early first-millennium Italy, possibly because it does not require an
explicit indictment of previous colonialist approaches. Work by Maria Cristina
Biella, for instance, places the conspicuous imagery of fantastic bestiary within
the longer Faliscan tradition of incised impasto decoration, emphasizing the
truly local elements that combine with eastern elements to make a completely
new figurative culture, one that is genuinely Etruscan and Italic.244 Cristiano
Iaia has conducted a number of diachronic analyses of feasting and drinking
equipment within central Italy that highlight the continuity of this practice
from before the arrival of eastern imported objects.245 He uses a contextual
analysis of these materials to underscore the importance of women in feasting
239
240
241
242
243
244
245

Smith 2011.
Riva 2010, 187.
Fulminante 2019.
Fulminante 2009; Fulminante and Stoddart 2013.
Fulminante 2020.
Biella 2007; further explored in Biella et al. 2012.
Iaia 2007.

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and the ways in which these materials were used for competition between
elite groups rather than simply the assertion of overall elite power.246 Further
south, Fabio Colivicchi has reassessed the nature of wine drinking within the
landscape of Magna Graecia and used contextual studies of drinking wares
and iconography to track the maintenance and eventual disappearance of particular traditional drinking forms in the diverse groups of southeastern Italy.247
Mariassunta Cuozzo has used an explicitly postcolonial theoretical approach
to conduct a long-term, contextual study of the ‘orientalizing’ cemetery at
Pontecagnano while embracing theoretical ideas such as hybridity and resistance in the face of Greek colonialism and Etruscan influences.248 Cuozzo’s
work is tied to that of Bruno d’Agostino and Luca Cerchiai, whose application of notions of alterity and the subaltern derives from Gramsci’s concepts
of hegemony and resistance.249 More recently, Cuozzo’s work has sought to
explain the absence of all but the most elite members of Etruscan society in
the material record during the ‘orientalizing’ period in terms of ‘symbolic violence’ directed toward the sub-elite of society.250 This effort helpfully does not
take the exclusive elite nature of the ‘orientalizing’ period for granted but looks
for an explanation.
Each of these material approaches to phenomena of the ‘orientalizing’
period, Greek colonialism, or simply cultural change in the early first millennium more broadly breaks with the earlier methodologies described above in
favor of a more nuanced understanding of cultural interaction within a local
context. A scholarly shift in this direction has also been argued for by Elena
Isayev and Vedia Izzet, both of whom call for refocusing attention on appropriation and choice, as well as further questions into exactly why particular
choices were made instead of relying upon evolutionary reasoning.251 These
attitudes do not center on a complete reexamination of the ‘orientalizing’
period and culture contact more broadly in the early first millennium but
rather argue for asking the question why and how in order to better understand the underlying reasoning for Italian participation within the sphere
of Mediterranean interaction and in particular to understand the nuances
of how this took place. The answers to these questions, as can be seen from
the examples above, provide more details to the social and cultural changes
that occurred within Etruria during this period, knowledge that would be left
246
247
248
249
250
251

Iaia 2016.
Colivicchi 2004.
Cuozzo 2003.
Cuozzo and Guidi 2013, 23, 96.
Cuozzo 2016.
Isayev 2007; Izzet 2007.

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unknown without a deeper exploration of the mechanics behind them. For a
term like ‘orientalizing,’ the mechanics of cultural change moving from East to
West are already either assumed to be understood or insignificant as long as
Etruria becomes ‘Eastern’ in the end.
Most recently, there has been a push to apply modern theories of globalization within the context of the ancient Mediterranean and particularly
in light of the increased connectivity of the first millennium.252 The definitions of globalization are vast, and some indeed restrict the phenomenon to
the particular historical circumstances that it developed under after the sixteenth century CE. There has been a push to apply the framework of globalization to premodern societies, arguing that these historical instances simply
differ in scale and intensity rather than fundamentally in kind.253 As Hodos
outlines, “globalization itself may be defined as processes of increasing connectivities that unfold and manifest as social awareness of those connectivities
(original italics)” and that these connectivities are defined by the “wide-scale
flow of ideas and knowledge alongside the sharing of cultural customs, civil
society, practices and the environment.”254 These definitions provide a number of advantages over current conceptions of ‘orientalizing’ within Etruria.
They focus on process rather than outcome, meaning that they avoid the teleological trap of working toward a predetermined outcome (such as the West
becoming Eastern) for such interconnectivity. By examining the flow of ideas
and knowledge on a wide scale, the framework of globalization breaks past the
Orientalist binary inherent in terms like ‘orientalizing.’ In fact, one of the most
appealing aspects of globalization is that it has a flattening aspect, which does
not privilege particular actors or historical processes over others. In the context of the Western Mediterranean, this is particularly important since frameworks of ‘orientalization’ and Greek colonization have privileged Greeks and
Phoenicians as traders, settlers, and disseminators of Eastern culture.255 For
the ‘orientalizing’ period within Etruria, such a flattening would allow for a
discussion that moves past an exclusive Orientalist focus on the reception of
Eastern objects, practices, and values, shifting focus to look for the effects of
connectivity with regions to the north, south, and west of Etruria. This means
putting Etruria in dialogue with regions of the Western Mediterranean, such
as Spain, France, the Balearics, Sicily, Sardinia, and North Africa, which have
252
253
254
255

Hodos 2009, 2010, 2017b, 2020; Pitts and Versluys 2014; Versluys 2014; van Dommelen 2017.
Hodos 2017a, 9. For further discussion of its applicability in the ancient world, see
Jennings 2011.
Hodos 2017a, 4.
The still prevalent Hellenocentric bias has reduced the role of Phoenicians in this, as
noted by López-Ruiz 2021, 44–62.

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been omitted within the ‘orientalizing’ paradigm, examining the similarities
and differences in their reactions to imported Eastern objects and practices,
studying the trade among these western Mediterranean groups, and tracing
the western Mediterranean regional maritime networks that also increased in
prominence during this period. The other important aspect that globalization
entails is the study of the social awareness of these connectivities in the past,
which provides a more neutral understanding of the ways in which Etruscan
elites and others both recognized and participated in a growing Mediterranean
koine. Associated concepts, such as glocalization, build on the postcolonial
framework of examining the effects of colonization within a local context by
exploring the ways in which local peoples responded to engagement and interconnectivity by adopting and modifying shared practices and values according
to local tradition.256
The key aspects of globalization certainly provide many corrections to previous issues with interpretations of ‘orientalizing,’ providing new methodologies and approaches for research, but the approach has yet to be taken up for
Etruria during the eighth and seventh centuries. The recent volume by Tamar
Hodos shows how the concept of globalization can be used to reanalyze materials from across the Mediterranean during this period in the first millennium
without the need for concepts of ‘orientalization’ or Hellenization.257 The
application of a concept drawn from the modern period is bound to bring with
it its own complications. Rather than simply stating that the early first millennium is an early instance of globalization, it is necessary to investigate where
this framework fits and where it is inadequate. The knowledge gained by such
comparisons can help clarify our understanding of this period and its cultural
ramifications in antiquity.
The push against the explicit application of modern theoretical concepts,
such as postcolonialism or globalization, within Etruscology fits into a broader
trend mentioned above. In part this is due to the heavy influence of a positivistic style of archaeology within Etruria and a resistance toward foreign scholars,
typically Anglo- or Francophone, who are believed to selectively appropriate
evidence from the Etruscan context to support their new theoretical framework without a thorough knowledge and grounding in the data. In light of the
historiography above, such an aversion to the imposition of foreign theoretical
concepts is completely understandable since many previous works were used
to advance certain political ideologies that had larger modern ramifications.
In fact, the reading of this historiography could understandably caution any
256
257

Robertson 1995; Hodos 2017a, 6.
Hodos 2020.

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against the application of modern ideologies onto the past because of these
ramifications and their skewing of our knowledge of the past. But I would
argue that such a divorcing from a scholar’s own modern context is impossible.
Instead, scholars should be explicit about the modern theoretical influences
that are at play within their work. While some authors discussed in this work
outlined or subtly hinted at the influence of their modern world on their scholarly endeavor, these influences were apparent even in those who omitted such
statements. Failing to acknowledge them does not mean that they do not exist.
The changes and personal experiences we encounter in the modern world are
one of the greatest drivers of new interpretations about the ancient world.
Expanding our understanding of known possibilities for human experience
drives us to look for evidence that others might have experienced something
similar in the past. We should be explicit and reflexive about the ways in which
these influences have shaped our own views of the past, so that our readers judge our interpretations with the necessary context. With this in mind,
the current trend in scholarship toward postcolonialism and globalization is
clearly being driven by the personal experiences of scholars in this moment
(myself included). Future historiographic work should be done to assess how
this current moment both opened our scholarship to new understandings of
the ancient world and blinded our investigations to aspects which are yet to
be explored.
7

Conclusions: Abandoning the Term

The ‘orientalizing’ style, period, and process of cultural change are not in
fact neutral academic categories but have been formulated to conceptualize
the earliest encounter between East and West and the West’s appropriation
of and subsequent improvement on specific traits of Eastern civilization that
are necessary for a Western teleological history of the evolution of civilization.
These terms, therefore, at their very core represent an intellectual conquest of
the West over the East. The influence of modern political movements on the
development of ‘orientalizing’ terms shows the degree to which scholarship
has been appropriated to serve the modern state interests of the West. Indeed,
it is because these terms are constantly oriented toward modern projects that
they have failed to properly explicate the complicated process of interaction in
the Mediterranean during the first millennium. Nor would any individual term
be capable of completely encapsulating such diverse types of interconnectivity. And while the continued evolution of the term will provide a great deal
of insight to future historiographers on the influence of modern intellectual

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trends on scholarship of this period, it will not result in a greater understanding of the complex processes at play in Mediterranean interaction, either
within Etruria or the rest of the Mediterranean. Therefore, the term ‘orientalizing’ needs to be removed from scholarship.
In the case of using ‘orientalizing’ as a descriptor of style or ‘orientalization’
as a method of cultural change, the term can and should be abandoned altogether. The root of ‘Orient’ in the word and the history of scholarship attached
to these terms has embedded a specific interpretation of artistic and cultural
exchange that has stifled explorations of outcomes that would not fit within
this Orientalist mode. As mentioned above, non-Eastern imported objects are
frequently omitted or downplayed in discussions. If the term is abandoned,
greater efforts can be taken to describe the exact process of exchange which
very often does not fit within the simplistic and Orientalist East–West binary.
By looking at cultural changes within their local context, in Etruria and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, scholarship can highlight the diverse types of foreign interaction that took place during this period.
Furthermore, ‘Orient’ inaccurately categorizes all Eastern peoples as the
same and characterizes them with universalizing stereotypes. Removing the
term will require a greater exploration of the exact peoples, cultures, and contexts of production in the eastern Mediterranean. These groups need to be
placed on equal scholarly footing with groups in Greece, Italy, and the western
Mediterranean as active agents in the construction of Mediterranean history.
There are many other periods of cultural exchange within Mediterranean history that have never required geographically specific terminology to describe
their outcomes. In fact, the most highly contested terms, Hellenization and
Romanization,258 have had similar calls for the discontinuation of their use.
In all these cases, scholarship has advanced by looking in greater detail at the
intersection of identity, ethnicity, gender, power, religion, economy, and craft
production in the context of larger cultural change than in finding new ways of
defining the associated ‘-ization’ term enough to make them hermeneutically
useful. A similar focus should be made for Etruria and its interactions with the
Mediterranean during the eighth and seventh centuries.
While the terminological use of ‘orientalizing’ for style and cultural process
can be easily avoided, the enshrinement of ‘orientalizing’ as a chronological period makes its removal more difficult. Finding a chronological marker
to replace it would inevitably repeat the mistakes outlined in this current
258

For critiques of Hellenization, see Martin 2007, 2017; Dietler and López-Ruiz 2009; Mairs
2012. See van Oyen 2015 for a summation of Romanization’s historiography and critiques
and Versluys 2014 for a call to reinvigorate the debate on the topic.

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historiography. Instead, scholars of Etruria and other locations around the
Mediterranean where the term is used should employ the local chronologies of
the Iron Age or Archaic period and its internal phases or the numbers of specific centuries.259 While there are certainly modern cultural biases embedded
in terms like ‘Iron Age,’ ‘Archaic,’ ‘Classical,’ and ‘Hellenistic,’ the implications
of specific cultural outcomes in antiquity are not as strong and unchanging as
what has been seen for ‘orientalizing.’ Situating cultural changes within local
chronologies rather than their predetermined outcome, which is a fictional
construction used to support the imaginary concept of Western civilization,
inherently calls for connecting any observed change within the local cultural patterns and traditions observed before and after. This will also serve to
broaden the chronological perspective of study by not singling out the eighth
and seventh centuries and by placing the changes of this period in a diachronic
understanding of interconnectivity.
Continued use of the term ‘orientalizing’ or ‘orientalization’ forces its study
to focus on the relationship between East and West, both through its semantics and historiography. As López-Ruiz has noted, other problematic terms can
continue to be applied when they are able to be redefined based on current
theoretical models,260 but for ‘orientalizing,’ the term is the theoretical model
with an Orientalist binary at its root. As more scholarship has observed the
diverse groups of peoples from the entire Mediterranean and central Europe
with whom the Etruscans were interacting during the first millennium, the
application of ‘orientalizing’ to the phenomenon or period becomes increasingly too restrictive and in fact inaccurate. In many ways, abandoning the
term ‘orientalizing’ simply matches with the current trends in scholarship,
which have aimed to identify the specific places of connectivity with whom
the Etruscans are engaged. As with the earlier use of the term ‘orientalizing,’
it is when these localized studies are fit within broader historical narratives
that this restrictive terminology is used. By not relying on such simplistic and
problematic language, scholarship would be forced to outline the increasingly
complex picture of interaction that scholarship has built for this period. Focus
should instead be placed on ideas of connectivity and its effects on local communities for Etruria and elsewhere.

259

260

This terminological abandonment and replacement with more neutral numerical numbering of the Iron Age has been recommended previously by Rathje 2010, 24. Brisart (2011)
has also chosen to use the term protoarchaic to avoid the issues attached to the term
‘orientalizing.’
López-Ruiz 2021, 66.

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While such a change in scholarly focus would help advance our understanding of the complexities of connectivity in the ancient Mediterranean,
it is also important to consider the ramifications such a change would have
on the Etruscan Western historical narrative. Within Etruscan history, reconceiving the cultural changes of the eighth and seventh century outside of the
Orientalist stereotypes would help to remove labels, such as ‘mysterious,’ that
have long characterized the Etruscans and push them beyond their historical
role of being an Eastern foil to the Western Romans. Conceiving of this period
as a time of connectivity among a number of different peoples would allow the
Etruscans to be better contextualized among the other Iron Age peoples of Italy
and the rest of the Mediterranean. This would directly counteract the nationalist perspectives on the period that had placed the Etruscans on a pedestal by
comparison to their other Iron Age counterparts within the Italian peninsula.
Such a conceptualization would also help to integrate Etruscology within the
broader trends of scholarly thinking in the rest of the Mediterranean, opening
a field of study that has had a tradition of being more inward looking.
Although this historiography has focused on the Etruscans, as Gunter,
Marchand, Riva and Vella et al., Martin, and López-Ruiz have pointed out, the
term ‘orientalizing’ is problematic in other parts of the Mediterranean as well
and, therefore, should be relinquished. The removal of the term would help to
conceive of Mediterranean history as a unitary whole rather than in an arbitrary division between East and West.261 Studying the Mediterranean as a geographic unit would help dismantle the privileged position of Greece, Rome,
and to some extent Etruria (particularly within Italy) as the exclusive protagonists of the Classical tradition and Western civilization. Historical constructions that lack such an East–West divide would also be better able to avoid an
evolutionary narrative of progress and advancement of civilization. Instead, a
universal history of the Mediterranean allows for conceiving of broad cultural
trends across a number of different groups of people, understanding crosscultural interactions from a variety of geographic directions and influences,
and looking for greater cultural convergences rather than seeking to find ways
to arbitrarily divide. Focusing on the Mediterranean as an intellectual unit has
been advocated elsewhere and such a perspective has served as an impulse for
new directions in scholarship. It is my hope that abandoning ‘orientalizing’

261

This unitary approach has been taken by the recent volumes on the early first millennium by Hodos 2020 and López-Ruiz 2021, as well as in earlier volumes with a more diachronic perspective, such as Horden and Purcell (2000), Abulafia (2011), and Broodbank
(2015).

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will similarly spur new studies, approaches, and connections for the study of
the first millennium.
Acknowledgments
This work developed out of one chapter of my PhD dissertation entitled
“Reorienting Orientalization: Intrasite Networks of Value and Consumption
in Central Italy,” submitted in May 2016 at Brown University. I would like to
thank my supervisor Peter van Dommelen and committee members John F.
Cherry, Susan Alcock, and Corinna Riva for their comments, feedback, and support. Much of this research was made possible by the Frank Brown/Samuel H.
Kress Foundation/Helen M. Woodruff Fellowship of the Archaeological Institute of America’s Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome.
I would like to extend my gratitude to the American Academy in Rome for
the resources and intellectual environment that were essential for the development of this research. Special thanks go to Kim Bowes, Denise Costanzo,
Clifford Ando, and Diane Favro who read and commented on an early version
of this research and Jessica Wright, who helped revise and refine my argument.
I would also like to thank Carolina López-Ruiz for reading an initial draft and
guiding me toward this journal so that I could publish this argument in full.
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Index
Acerbo, Giacomo 49
Acquarossa 59
Alkimos 66
alphabet 2, 22, 55, 76
alternative names (orientalizing)
ägyptisirend 33
Graeco-Oriental 36, 39, 66
Graeco-Phoenician 36, 39
korinthischen 33
phönicisirend 33
Amenophis III 42
antiquarianism 6, 10, 11, 22, 51
architecture 2, 36, 40
aristocratic
agency/active role 9, 57–58, 72
Mediterranean culture 58, 61, 70, 72,
73–74
way of life 57–58, 72, 73, 77
see also, elites
art
figural representation 12, 13, 16, 28, 30–1,
32, 48
marker of civilization 22, 66
progress 6, 10, 16, 35, 66, 70, 84
stagnation 8, 15, 18, 55
artistic style
Classical 16, 37, 38
Geometric 7, 13, 31, 34, 35, 47, 48
Asia Minor 41, 44, 47
Assyria 6, 33, 36, 37, 39, 46, 56, 71
Athens 42
Atlantis 24
Augustus 49
banquets 8, 9, 58, 59–63, 65, 68
see also, feasting
Bianchi-Giovanni, Aurelio 24
Bible 10, 18
Brizio, Edoardo 40–1, 42–3, 44, 47, 54, 67
Bügelkanne vase 42
Buonarroti, Filippo 11
Caylus, Anne Claude de 6, 10, 11, 12, 18, 22
Cesnola 28
chronological periods
Archaic 64, 77, 83
Bronze Age 21, 40, 42, 65, 77

Classical 16, 37, 38, 55, 83
Hellenistic 83
Iron Age 9, 39, 42, 61, 64, 73, 75, 83, 84
Classics, discipline 4
Collignon, Maxime 36, 37
colonialism
European 47, 59
Greek, ancient 6, 23, 40, 43, 69, 73, 78, 79
Italian 8, 41, 52–3, 54, 55, 69
Roman 53
colonialist interpretations 9, 39, 62, 63, 66,
68–73, 77
commensality 60, 63
commerce 6, 11, 12
connectivity 9, 62, 68, 72, 76, 79–80, 83, 84
continuity 63, 71, 73, 77
Conze, Alexander 7, 31–35, 43, 46, 55, 58
Cortona 20
craftspeople 35, 39, 57, 58, 67–8, 70
Cuoco, Vincenzo 7, 23–4
Cyprus 28, 72
Delfico, Melchiore 25–6
Della Seta, Alessandro 8, 43–6, 48, 58
Demaratus 69–70
Dempster, Thomas 19
diffusionism 39, 42, 67, 73, 74, 75
Dionysius of Halicarnassus 5, 6, 19–20, 22
Druids 23, 24
Ducati, Pericle 8, 43, 46–51, 56, 58, 60, 62,
64
Egyptian 7, 17, 37
art 6, 10, 11–8, 22, 30, 39, 46, 47
dung beetle metaphor 14
Etruscan descent 11, 25–6
influence 6, 10, 11–2, 14–15, 24, 48
monarchy 15, 63
mummification 11
pyramids 11
Egyptology 7
Egyptomania 27
elites
agency 61, 72
competition 71, 78
consumption 61, 68
Etruscan 58, 63, 68, 72, 77, 78, 80

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elites (cont.)
emulation 65–66
gift-exchange 61
pan-Mediterranean 56, 57, 72, 80
see also, aristocratic
epigraphy 22, 63
Este 41
Etruscan
formation 8, 9, 44, 50, 52, 53, 54
monarchy 9, 51, 56, 58, 63–5, 70, 76–7
origins
autochthony 5, 6–7, 19–20, 22, 24–6,
29, 53
Lydia 5, 6, 19–21, 22, 26, 41, 42, 47,
49, 53
Rhaetia 7, 21, 49
primacy 7, 20, 22, 25, 29, 73
Etruscheria 19, 21, 22
Etruscology 4–5, 22, 25, 39, 52, 65
disciplinary insularity 75, 80, 84
European identity 3, 4, 18, 29, 39

migration to Italy 20
mythology 16, 18, 22, 48
symposion 59–60, 62
Guarnacci, Mario 23, 24, 39

Falerii 16
Faliscan 73, 77
Fascism 8, 48–9, 51, 52–3
manifesto della razza 49, 53
racial ideology 46, 49, 53, 54
rassegna sociale dell’Africa italiana
feasting 59, 60, 61–3, 77
see also, banquets
François vase 42
Fréret, Nicolas 21

Jupiter

52–3

gender 45, 51, 74–5, 77, 82
gift-exchange 61
globalization 5, 9, 79–81
glocalization 80
goldsmithing 51, 67
Gori, Antonio 22
Greek
art 11, 13, 29–39, 46
art history 3, 7–8, 29–40, 45, 52
artistic idealism 7, 16–18, 30, 38, 46
colonialism 6, 23, 40, 43, 69, 73, 78, 79
histories 20–21, 66, 69–70
influence in Egypt 15
influence in Etruria 6, 8, 16, 22, 45, 46,
49

habrosyne 66
Harrison, Jane 37–8
Helbig, Wolfgang 40
Hellanicus of Lesbos 6, 19, 20, 21, 22
Hellen 20
Hellenes 20
Hellenism 55
Hellenization 80, 82
Hellenocentrism 60, 70
Heraclides Ponticus 66
Herodotus 5, 6, 16, 19, 20–1, 22
Heyne, Christian Gottlob 6, 10, 12–3, 18
Homer 16, 36, 40, 45
hybridity 75, 78
infant burials

75, 77

14, 15

Khorsabad 36
Knight, Richard Payne 38
koine, Mediterranean 80
Lanzi, Luigi 7, 22, 30
Layard, Austen Henry 28
Lemnos 44
libation 60
luxury 65–68
Eastern 5, 37, 58, 62, 64
feminine 51
international style of 55, 57
luxury goods 58, 67, 71, 74
tryphe 9, 66
Lydia 40
for origins, see Etruscan origins
Lydians 20–1, 26
Magna Graecia 23, 78
Martha, Jules 41
Mazzoldi, Angelo 7, 24
migration
conception of cultural transfer
52, 54, 69

8, 11, 41,

Etruscan Orientalization
eastern 8, 39, 40, 41–4, 47, 53, 67
of craftspeople 67–68
southern 40, 53
Molise 23
Mommsen, Theodore 21
monarchy 63–5
Eastern form of government 15, 17
Etruscan 51, 56, 67
evolutionary descriptor 73
orientalizing suite 9, 58, 68, 76, 77
see also, symbol of power
Montelius, Oscar 8, 42–4, 47
Müller, K.O. 21
Murlo 59
Mussolini 49
Mycenae 34, 36, 40
Napoleonic expedition 27, 28
nationalism 5–7, 9, 18–19, 21–25, 28–29, 31,
52, 73, 84
French 18, 23
nation-state 18, 31
Nazi Germany 49
Near East 3, 71
art 55
banquet 59–62
courts 56, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 70
early evidence of civilization 7, 26
geographic generalization 33
see also, Orient
symbol of power 63–65
Newton, C.T. 36
Niebuhr, B.G. 21
Nimrud 51
Nineveh 28, 36
non-elite 62–63, 78
Orient 2–3, 9, 28, 29, 33, 37, 39, 45, 82
Orientalism
construction of European identity 2–3,
9, 29, 30–31, 35
definition 2–3
eastern stagnation 7, 9, 12, 15, 18, 37, 55
femininity 45–46, 50, 51–2
lack of geographic specificity 2, 32–3, 82
see also, Orient
Roman 5, 56
Semitic stereotypes 46, 49

103
Orientalist
academic tradition 2–3, 24, 25
chronological division 7, 8, 44–48, 51, 62
confrontation in antiquity 2, 5, 7, 9–10,
31, 33–8, 46, 49–51, 55, 81
disparagement of Eastern art 10, 12,
15–16, 32
language 6, 7, 27–28, 37–8, 41, 48, 50,
66–7, 84
Pallottino, Massimo 8–9, 17, 44, 52–7, 69, 70
Pamphus 14–5
Pelasgians 6, 16, 19, 20, 23, 24
Persia 5, 13, 15, 16, 17
destruction of Athens 42
Peschiera fibula 42
Phoenician
art 3, 10, 12, 13, 15, 30, 45, 48
banqueting 59–60, 63
bowls 28, 36
craftspeople 38, 68
government 65
imports 41, 45, 47, 51, 71
influence 6, 8, 12, 14, 24, 41, 44, 46, 70
metal wares 40, 41
middlemen 39
settlements 72
trade 14, 39, 43, 79
Plato 23, 24
Pontecagnano 78
Posidonius 66
postcolonialism 5, 9, 75–81
pottery
Attic 30, 50
bucchero 58, 60, 61, 72
Corinthian 43, 46, 58
Geometric 7, 13, 31, 34–5, 47–8
impasto 58, 60, 77
proto-Corinthian 48
prehistory 4, 8
pre-Roman groups 6, 18, 19, 25, 29, 49
princely 9, 51, 58, 63, 64, 68, 73
principesca 51–2, 76
tombs 63
way of life/lifestyle 9, 58, 68–75
processual archaeology 57
Psammetichus 14
Pythagorean school 23

104
resistance 71, 78, 80
Rhaetia 7, 21, 49
Risorgimento 7, 23, 25, 49
Rome
art 10, 11, 13, 18, 48, 50
city 4, 50
colonialism 53
Empire 19, 20, 24, 41, 48–9, 56
Hellenistic influence 55
in Western civilization 2–4, 10, 18–19,
50–1, 64, 84
monarchy 64, 70, 76
relationship with Etruria 4–5, 17, 19, 50,
52, 63–64, 70
Republic 5, 56, 64, 67
Romanization 82
Said, Edward 2–3, 29
Schliemann, Heinrich 34
Sergi, Giuseppe 49
Shield of Achilles 36, 40
Sparta 40
Spina 20
Stosch gem 16
symbol of power 63–5, 77
see also, monarchy
Tacitus 20
Tarquinia 47, 59, 70
Theopompus 66
Terramare 21
Thessaly 20
Timaeus 66
Tomb
Of Porsena 11
Of the Leopards 59
Regolini-Galassi 27, 28, 36, 40, 42, 47,
51, 56

Nowlin
tomba
a camera 40
del guerriero 47
Trojan War 20, 23
Tyrrhenia 20
Tyrrhenians 47
Umbrians 41, 47
urbanism 2, 8, 30, 61, 65
value 66, 69, 71, 74, 75, 79, 80
Vatican 28, 40
Villa Guilia 43, 44
Villanovan 41, 57, 58, 60
Western civilization
appropriation of the East 9, 29, 38–39,
55, 72
invented tradition 2–6, 83
origins 2–3, 6, 19, 34, 35, 51, 52
role of Greece and Rome 3–4, 63–64, 84
surpassing the East 12, 29, 38–39, 55
universal histories 10, 84
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 6, 10, 12,
13–8, 22, 29, 33, 44, 69
art and government 6, 14, 15, 16–7
geographic determinism 16
Greek naturalism and idealism 16–18
Orientalism 6, 13–6
origins of art 13–4
world-systems 71
writing 8, 30, 67, 68, 70, 76
see also, alphabet