Etrusca.
Somewhere between 900 and 800 BC, the Italian peninsula was settled by
a mysterious peoples called the Etruscans. We don't know where the
Etruscans came from, but archaeologists suspect that they came from the
eastern Mediterannean, possibly Asia Minor. We will, however, never
really know where they came from or why they colonized Italy. We do
know that when they came to Italy, they brought civilization and
urbanization with them. They founded their civilizations in
north-eastern Italy between the Appenine mountain range and the
Tyrrhenian Sea. Their civilization stretched from the Arno river in the
north to the Tiber river towards the center of the Italian peninsula;
it was on the Tiber river that a small village of Latins, the village
that would become Rome, sat. So the Romans, who were only villagers
during the rise of the Etruscan civilization, were in close contact
with the Etruscans, their language, their ideas, their religion, and
their civilization; the Etruscans were the single most important
influence on Roman culture in its transition to civilization.
They were a sophisticated people, with an alphabet based on the Greek
alphabet, a powerfully original sculptural and painting tradition, a
religion based on human-type gods which they had learned from the
Greeks, and a complicated set of rituals for divining the future, which
they handed down to the Romans and unlike most civilizations of the
time, gender inequality seems not to have been very pronounced.
