MR. TAYLOR ON THE ETRUSCANS.* [FIRST NOTICE.]
WE took up this book with much interest, expecting to derive from a new work, by the learned author of Words and Places, no small amount of gratification and instruction. If our expecta- tions have not been fully realised, they have not been altogether disappointed. When we learned from his book that Mr. Taylor claims to have solved the most difficult problem in ethnology and philology, the origin of the Etruscan race and the interpretation of the Etruscan language—the riddle which has puzzled the world for twenty centuries—we could not but doubt whether he would prove a more able Edipus than the many who have gone before him. For the language, as we know it from some 3,000 inscrip- tions, mostly sepulchral, which have come down to us, although tested by all the known ancient tongues, and by many modern, has hitherto defied all the erudition brought to bear upon it, and baffled all attempts at interpretation. Each theory in turn has been proved to the entire satisfaction of its propounder, yet the world has unkindly refused to acknowledge any one of these tongues as the true key to the Etruscan, and persists in regarding the problem as one yet to be solved. We were there- fore prepared for a fresh disappointment. Yet Mr. Taylor tells his tale in so lucid, picturesque, and earnest a manner, that although he may fail to convince us, he commands our attention and interest. His theory is that the Etruscans were a nomad horde of Tatars or Turcomans, who left their home in Central Asia, "at the lowest estimate, some 3,000 years ago," and wandered westward till they reached Italy, which they found already oc- cupied by another race, also of Turanian origin, but of the Euro- pean or Finnic branch of that stock, by their conquest of and amalgamation with whom was formed the great Etruscan nation. Having, on grounds quite independent of philology, already arrived at the conclusion that the Etruscans must have belonged to the Tatar family of nations, be resolved, more out of curiosity than from any absolute expectation of success, to test the lan- guage by the Finno-Turkic tongues. " To my surprise and de- light," he tells us, " I found that my success was definite and instantaneous. The wards of the lock which had rusted for twenty centuries, and which had presented such obstinate resistance to all attempts to open it, yielded at once on the application of this key. Every key, except the right one, had already been tried in vain ; when the right key was at length found, almost by accident, and inserted in the lock, there could be no question as to the precision of the fit." The languages, for they are legion, which form Mr. Taylor's boasted key are those of all Turanian nations, Asiatic and European ; but he professes to find the closest and most abundant affinities in the Ugric or Altaic tongues, or those of the Turanian tribes who inhabit the lofty table land of Central Asia, and their outlying congeners, comprising the Finnic, Samojedic, Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic peoples. For after eliminating one Turanian language after another, as only more or less remotely allied to the Etruscan, he comes to the conclusion that the Ugrie branch of the Turanian stock is unquestionably the closest, and the only one to which the Etruscan can be directly affiliated. Foremost among this group of languages, in point of proximity to the Etruscan, he places those of the Yenissei; " next, the dialects of the Ostiaks, the Wogule, the Yukahiri, the Tschuwashes, the Wotiaks, the Uigurs, the Magyars, and the Ugrian tribes which form the ethnic link between the Finnic and the Turkic stocks."
• Etruscan Researches. By Isaac Taylor, M.A. London: Macmillan and Co. 1874.
If the Etruscans were indeed Turanians, we should a priori expect their language to bear the nearest affinity to those of other Turanian nations of corresponding antiquity and culture,—to those of Egypt or China, for instance. But this Mr. Taylor will not admit, and we are somewhat startled to learn that the Etrus- can is much more closely akin to certain living dialects of Siberia, Spoken by tribes who in ancient times had no written character, and whose nomad habits and imperfect civilisation could not have been favourable to the preservation of their language in its purity through so many centuries.
Mr. Taylor is not content to prove from linguistic affinities that the Etruscans were of Turanian race. He seeks to prove it also from the names by which they were known to the ancients.' He would establish an analogy between "Tyrrhenoi," one of the names by which the Greeks designated the Etruscans, and " Turan," the appellation given by the old Persians to the Turcoman tribes on their northern frontier, and whence we derive the modern ethnic term " Turanian ;" and also between the other name, " Tyrsenoi," by which the Etruscans were known to.the Greeks, and " Tursenna," or " Turkhenna," which, he informs us, means in the Ugric tongues Turk-men, or Turco-men. Even the name by which the Etrus- cans designated themselves, " Rasenna," he finds to be a Ugric word, signifying " tribesmen," or " men of the nation." This is the very argument of his book,—to prove by affinities of language, as well as by other analogies, that the Tyrrhenians of Italy were of kindred race with the Turanians of Turkestan.
That the Etruscans were Turanians is no novel theory. It was propounded years ago by Mr. Fergusson. Even most of those who have regarded them as Aryans or Semites have agreed in admitting their Oriental origin. The universal tradition of anti- quity, with one solitary exception, has pronounced them to have come from Asia Minor, and notably from Lydia, and is not easily to be set aside, confirmed as it is by the peculiarities in their political and religious institutions, in their social and domestic customs, which distinguish them ou many points from the Greeks, and assimilate them closely to the Egyptians and other Oriental nations of antiquity,—characteristics which have been too much overlooked by Niebuhr, Lepsius, and other German writers, who regard them as an indigenous people of Italy or of the Rhmtian Alps.
While there can be little doubt that " Tuscos Asia sibi vindicat," we have hitherto had nothing but conjecture that they were of Turanian rather than of Aryan or Semitic origin,—a conjecture founded chiefly on the analogy presented by the multitude and splendour of their sepulchral monuments, the Turanians having been pronounced the tomb-building race par excellence. Mr. Taylor's aim is to convert this conjecture, this " vague suspicion," into certainty. He readily accepts the tradition of their Lydian origin, since he claims both the Lydians and Lycians as Turanians for this same reason, that they have left conspicuous sepulchral monuments. How far the traditional brotherhood of the Etruscans with the Lydians holds good might have been patent ere this, if the researches which Mr. Dennis commenced in 1868 in the Bin Tepe at Sardis, with the view of settling that long-vexed question, bad not been abruptly brought to a close.
We must express our surprise that Mr. Taylor does not make more of the striking analogies which be acknowledges to exist between the artistic remains and sepulchral usages of Egypt and Etruria. Surely those resemblances which meet us on every hand in the earliest art works of the Etruscans are something more than " superficial," as Mr. Taylor pronounces them to be, and can hardly be explained by the commercial intercourse between the peoples and by Etruscans studying art in the Egyptian school. Mr. Taylor is here blinded by his theory. The reason he gives for regarding these resemblances as superficial is that the philo- logical argument is conclusive against any close affinity between the races. "The Etruscan language bears no closer relation to the Egyptian than that of a distant cousinship." This brings us to the main argument on which be bases the theory he propounds —that " the ultimate and surest test of race is language—the only teat which is thoroughly complete and satisfactory." This dictum cannot be accepted without reserve. It may be doubted whether, in the case of uncivilised tribes possessing no written character, especially when of nomad habits, language, after the lapse of a few centuries, can be relied on as any test of race. That such tribes, though closely allied in origin, often lose all lin- guistic affinities, is a fact well known to those who have occasion to study savage tongues. In portions of South America, for example, the aborigines of a limited district are found divided into several tribes, bearing different names, and speaking distinct
languages, so entirely distinct as not only to be phonetically un• intelligible to the neighbouring tribes, but when represented in European characters to bear no apparent affinity. Yet these tribes are unmistakably of one and the same race, of the true Tatar or Mongolian type, with identical customs, observances, and habits of life ; with the same mental characteristics, and not differing in physiognomy and outward appearance more than the natives of adjoining counties in England. This fact, for which we can per- sonally vouch, is not very favourable to Mr. Taylor's theory. If certain Turanian tribes of South America, though found in close contact, have lost all linguistic affinities, it is difficult to believe- that. others of Northern and Central Asia should have preserved these affinities with a race from whom they have been separated for 3,000 years, and by more than as many miles. The Etruscans must have left their native East at least some ten centuries before Christ. The races from which, according to Mr. Taylor, they then branched off, and with whose languages he supposes their tongue to be most nearly allied, were nomad uncultured tribes, without a literature or even a written character, and he is compelled to admit that under such circumstances language is exposed to an immense amount of corruption and alteration. He also admits that only within comparatively recent times have the Ugric dialects arrived at the dignity of possessing a fixed grammar and vocabulary, the only exceptions to this rule being the Turkish, the Magyar, and the Finnish tongues on the Baltic, all of which• have absorbed foreign—that ie, Semitic or Aryan—elements to a great extent. We may well hesitate, then, to accept unreservedly all the conclusions at which he has arrived from a comparison of the languages of nations so widely removed both by time and space.
The course, moreover, which Mr. Taylor adopts in his quest of
linguistic affinities is not such as to secure our confidence in the results he announces. Not content with seeking analogies to the Etruscan in any one Ugric language, or in any one class of such languages, he claims the right to ransack the whole family of Turanian tongues, ancient or modern, civilised or savage. If the Finnish or Samojedic will not yield the desired analogy, be seeks it in the Egyptian or Basque. If the Turkish does not respond to his call, he presses the Chinese or Magyar into his service. We must be allowed to question whether such a method is philosophical, and whether any theory, however fanciful, may not be proved by such a process.
We cannot presume to keep step with Mr. Taylor in his re-
searches into the structure and vocabulary of some "scores of languages," on which he feasts with a wolfish appetite for affinities.. Not to every man is it given to possess such scholarship as Mr. Taylor exhibits. We must be content, therefore, to take on trust much that he offers for our acceptance. Some of his analogies, however, are too far-fetched to be adapted to the deglutition and digestion of ordinary mortals. That, for example, which he presents at page 187, between the Etruscan word " Kiemzathrm," and a " jaw-breaking word " from a Siberian dialect, which is 1735 was spoken only by ten men, and is now probably extinct, may be real, but is certainly not apparent. Both words, which, he says, signify "eighty," we give as he prints them :— Ariner : KINA-MAN-TSCJIATJ-THJUNG
Etruscan : KI 111 Z A TIM as
The same may be said of the analogies tabled at page 110, where, to the Etruscan word Hinthial, which seems to signify an "image"' or "spectre," equivalents are given in sundry Turanian dialects, the "jinn," or '• jan," however, of the Turkish strongly savour- ing of the Semitic element in that language. Nor can we admit, as perfectly satisfactory, his interpretation of the words inscribed on a pair of Etruscan dice found at Toscanella in 1848, and which he regards as "the manifest key to the great secret." The words are MACH— TEU—liIITH—KI—ZAL, and sa, and he takes for granted that they represent the numerals from 1 to 6, and arranges them in their order according to Ugric affinities. Analogy is certainly in favour of these monosyllables representing numerals, but still there is room for doubt. They may be the names of letters, instead of numbers ; they may be conventional signs, or they may be terms proper to the gaming-table, as we use ace, deuce, terce, or tierce, &c. Far more cogent and conclusive is Mr. Taylor's reasoning at page 197, as to the meaning of the words
avil or avils, leine, and lupu, so frequently used in Etruscan mortuary inscriptions in conjunction with numbers. From a careful comparison of monuments, he logically deduces their mean- ing to be respectively, " years," "age," or "aged," " lived," and " died."
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