1 : an extinct northern Semitic alphabet used by the Phoenicians of Syria and their Carthaginian colonists from the 13th century b.c. and the immediate ancestor of the Greek alphabet.

Phoenicia, ancient region corresponding to modern Lebanon, with adjoining parts of modern Syria and Israel. Its inhabitants, the Phoenicians, were notable merchants, traders, and colonizers of the Mediterranean in the 1st millennium bce.

Etruscan language, language isolate spoken by close neighbours of the ancient Romans. The Romans called the Etruscans Etrusci or Tusci; in Greek they were called Tyrsenoi or Tyrrhenoi; in Umbrian and Italic language their name can be found in the adjective turskum. The Etruscans’ name for themselves was rasna or raśna.

20 AD

Some Greeks held that the Etruscans were a branch of the Pelasgians, aboriginal inhabitants of the Aegean region, others such as Virgil thought they came from Lydia, a kingdom of western Anatolia. The Greek master historian Herodotus also ascribes the origin of the Etruscans to Lydia.

Three main theories have emerged: that the Etruscans came from Anatolia, Southern Turkey, as propounded by the Greek historian Herotodus; that they were indigenous to the region and developed from the Iron Age Villanovan society, as suggested by another Greek historian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus; or that they …

The slaves Like all ancient civilizations, the Etruscans also used slaves for their labour force, and they provided low cost manpower that could nevertheless also be highly specialized. The main sources of slaves were wars and raids in enemy territory.

Etruscan civilization endured until it was assimilated into Roman society. The reduction in Etruscan territory was gradual, but after 500 BC, the political balance of power on the Italian peninsula shifted away from the Etruscans in favor of the rising Roman Republic.

Etruscan, member of an ancient people of Etruria, Italy, between the Tiber and Arno rivers west and south of the Apennines, whose urban civilization reached its height in the 6th century bce. Many features of Etruscan culture were adopted by the Romans, their successors to power in the peninsula.

The Etruscans: They learned many techniques about engineering, or the science of building, from them (the arch and the cuniculus), the Etruscans bloody events, where two slaves fight after the death of their masters and the winner was executed, thousands of slaves died fighting the gladiators, and the chariots races …

Yet the Etruscans, whose descendants today live in central Italy, have long been among the great enigmas of antiquity. Their language, which has never properly been deciphered, was unlike any other in classical Italy. Their origins have been hotly debated by scholars for centuries.

Regarding Italians, the North African ancestry does not exceed 2% of their genomes. On average, 1% of Jewish ancestry is found in Tuscan HapMap population and Italian Swiss, as well as Greeks and Cypriots.

The current population of Tuscany is not descended from the Etruscans, the people that lived in the region during the Bronze Age, a new Italian study has shown. The scientific data does not necessarily mean that the Etruscans died out, the researchers said. …

The Etruscans, people from the Etrurian region of the Italian peninsula, were known as the Tyrrhenians to the Greeks. They were at their height in Italy from the 8th to the 5th century BCE, and they were rivals and to a degree precursors to the Greeks.

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