Ebook The Etruscans

The Celts, on their first irruption into Europe, dwelt for a time in Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece; in Thessaly and Greece they were called Pelasgi. The concurrent testimony of ancient authors, who state that the Etruscan cities were Pelasgian, is to be taken to mean that the Etruscans were of the same Celtic stock as the Pelasgians of Greece, probably Pelasgians thrown forward upon Italy by those waves of population which rapidly followed each other from Western Asia. After the Etruscans had been settled for some time in Italy, principally in the country between the PO and the Tiber, their pure Druidical worship was affected by the arrival of a Chaldaean ritual and the art of the sooth sayer; these had been dislodged from their native seats by one of those social and political convulsions which from time to time shook the Babylonian Empire — and had passed into Lydia or Maconia,1 the land of enchanters and soothsayers, and thence into Italy, where they found a home among a kindred race, the Etruscans; thus some authors assert that the Etruscans were of Lydian origin.