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The Etruscans: Lost Civilizations Paperback – January 22, 2024

by Lucy Shipley (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 43 ratings
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Now in paperback, a brief introduction to the mysteries of the enigmatic, ancient civilization in the area of modern Italy.

The Etruscans were a powerful people, marked by an influential civilization in ancient Italy. But despite their prominence, the Etruscans are often portrayed as mysterious—a strange and unknowable people whose language and culture have largely vanished. Lucy Shipley’s The Etruscans presents a different picture.

Shipley writes of a people who traded with Greece and shaped the development of Rome, who inspired Renaissance artists and Romantic firebrands, and whose influence is still felt strongly in the modern world. Covering colonialism and conquest, misogyny and mystique, she weaves Etruscan history with new archaeological evidence to give us a revived picture of the Etruscan people. The book traces trade routes and trains of thought, describing the journey of Etruscan objects from creation to use, loss, rediscovery, and reinvention. From the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy displayed in a fashionable salon to the extra-curricular activities of Bonaparte, from a mass looting craze to a bombed museum in a town marked by massacre, the book is an extraordinary voyage through Etruscan archaeology, which ultimately leads to surprising and intriguing places.

In this sharp and groundbreaking book, Shipley gives readers a unique perspective on an enigmatic people, revealing just how much we know about the Etruscans—and just how much still remains undiscovered.
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  1. Part of series
    Lost Civilizations
  2. Print length
    208 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Reaktion Books
  5. Publication date
    January 22, 2024
  6. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    1789148324
  8. ISBN-13
    978-1789148329
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Etruscans is cleverly written, because each chapter deals with one problem and then takes one object or place as an example of that problem. . . . This is a splendid little book, which brings the Etruscans up to date and does much to strip away the mystery that surrounds this lost civilization." ― Current World Archaeology

"Shipley sets her course by identifying a select object or place as a focus for each chapter. . . . These prompt an examination of different aspects of the Etruscan world. It is a neat device enabling the author to guide us through what has actually been discovered, what the objects may say about the Etruscans, and to make robust examinations of a range of theories about them that have been put forward over time. . . . Shipley’s book is as engaging as her subject. Her work leaves us eager to discover more about this most fascinating group of people." ― Minerva

"Shipley’s [bridges] deftly the ancient evidence and modern debates, and [shifts] focus seamlessly from the big picture to captivating details. She writes in an engaging, breezy style . . . Shipley’s book accomplishes its mission with aplomb: it will not only hold the interest of students and scholars alike, but also speak in powerful ways to the interested lay reader. Indeed, if there is one book among the recent spate of works on the Etruscans that is likely to win over the popular imagination—one as alive to their distinct character and accomplishments as their lost legacy and muddled afterlives—Shipley’s book is surely it. For The Etruscans demonstrates that new facts can be more interesting than old fiction." ― Classical Journal

"Balanced and fully informed. . . . Excellent." -- Fred S. Kleiner ― Historian

“Shipley’s concise and elegant prose serves as an ideal complement to her fascinating subject. The people of this remarkable and enigmatic culture come alive in a brilliant treatment appropriate for any audience.” -- Anthony Tuck, University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of the Poggio Civitate Excavations

About the Author

Lucy Shipley is a writer and blogger. She received her PhD in Etruscan archaeology from the University of Southampton in 2014.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Reaktion Books (January 22, 2024)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1789148324
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1789148329
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 43 ratings

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
43 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Gary Powell
5.0 out of 5 stars unveiling of a lost European civilization
Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2023
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Me. Shipley has created a vision of these pre-Roman Italian people that is credible and accessible. Many of the features of these people survived into the written records of Greek and Roman civilizations. Their writing in an inaccessible language and records on media that was fragile confounds modern understanding and served their sense of mystery. Funerary sculpture and frescoes have been the only way to access understanding but modern reconstruction via DNA have greatly augmented our sense of who these people were and how the lived.
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enkilm
5.0 out of 5 stars About time!
Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2023
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Brilliant,well written,great photos,and great well rounded font of information.
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bclawson
3.0 out of 5 stars Informative
Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2018
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If you are interested in learning more about Etruscan society this book will do that. My three star rating is because too much space was spent on modern liberalism & feminism. The author does this while making valid points but spends too much time trying to force modern ideas on an ancient culture. Perhaps we live in over-politicized times. Still a good book and well written on a culture that has no where near the resources for the amatuer historian as their neighbors down the peninsula.
18 people found this helpful
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5.0 out of 5 stars the book's structure and prose are all wonderful. Quite simply
Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2017
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An thoroughly engaging treatment of a fascinating subject. The author's choice of subjects, the book's structure and prose are all wonderful. Quite simply, this is a brilliant, accessible work perfect for anyone interested in the Etruscan people.
6 people found this helpful
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Stan Prager
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Work!
Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2020
When I visited New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art some years ago, the object I found most stunning was the “Monteleone Chariot,” a sixth century Etruscan bronze chariot inlaid with ivory. I stood staring at it, transfixed, long enough for my wife to shuffle her feet impatiently. Still I lingered, dwelling on every detail, especially the panels depicting episodes from the life of Homeric hero Achilles. By that time, I had read The Iliad more than once, and had long been immersed in studies of ancient Greece. How was it then, I wondered, that I could speak knowledgeably about Solon and Pisistratus, but yet know so little about the Etruscans who crafted that chariot in the same century those notables walked the earth?
Long before anyone had heard of the Romans, city-states of Etruria dominated the Italian peninsula—and, along with Carthage and a handful of Greek poleis—the central Mediterranean, as well. Later, Rome would absorb, crush or colonize all of them. In the case of the Etruscans, it was to be a little of each. And somehow, somewhat incongruously, over the millennia Etruscan civilization—or at least what the living, breathing Etruscans would have recognized as such—has been lost to us. But not lost in the way we usually think of “lost civilizations,” like Teotihuacan, for instance, or the Indus Valley, where what remains are ruins of a vanished culture that disappeared from living memory, an undeciphered script, and even the uncertain ethnicity of its inhabitants. The Etruscans, on the other hand, were never forgotten, their alphabet can be read although their language largely defies translation, and their DNA lingers in at least some present-day Italians. Yet, by all accounts they are nevertheless lost, and tantalizingly so.
Such a conundrum breeds frustration, of course: Romans supplanted the Etruscans but hardly exterminated them. Moreover, unlike other civilizations deemed “lost to history,” the Etruscans appear in ancient texts going as far back as Hesiod. There are also hundreds of excavated tombs, rich with decorative art and grave goods, the latter top-heavy with Greek imports they clearly treasured. So how can we know so much about the Etruscans and at the same time so little? Fortunately, Lucy Shipley, who holds a PhD in Etruscan archaeology, comes to a rescue of sorts with her well-written, delightful contribution to the scholarship, entitled simply The Etruscans, a volume in the digest-sized Lost Civilization series published by Reaktion Books.
Most Etruscan studies are dominated by discussions of the ancient sources and—most prominently—the tombs, which are nothing short of magnificent. But where does that lead us? Herodotus references the Etruscans, as does Livy. But are the sources reliable? Rather dubious, as it turns out. Herodotus may be a dependable chronicler of the Hellenes, but anyone who has read his comically misguided account of Egyptian life and culture is aware how far he can stray from reality. And Roman authors such as Livy routinely trumped a decidedly negative perspective, most evident in disdainful memories of the unwelcome semi-legendary Etruscan kings that are said to have ruled Rome until the overthrow of “Tarquin the Proud” in 509 BCE.
Then there are the tombs. Attempts to extrapolate what ancient life was like from the art that decorates the tombs of the dead—awe inspiring as it may be—can present a distorted picture (pun fully intended!) that ignores all but the wealthiest elite slice of the population. Much like Egyptology’s one-time obsession for pyramids and the pharaoh’s list tended to obscure the no less interesting lives of the non-royal—such as those of the workers who collected daily beer rations and left graffiti within the walls of pyramids they constructed—the emphasis on tombs that is standard to Etruscan studies reveals little of the lives of the vast majority of ordinary folks that peopled their world.
Shipley neatly sidesteps these traditional traps by failing to be constrained by them. Instead, she relies on her training as an archaeologist to ask questions: what do we know about the Etruscans and how do we know it? And, perhaps more critically: what don’t we know and why don’t we know it? In the process, she brings a surprisingly fresh look to an enigmatic people in a highly readable narrative suitable to both academic and popular audiences. Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, the author selects a specific artifact or site for each chapter to serve as a visual trigger for the discussion. Because Shipley is so talented with a pen, it is worth pausing to let her explain her methodology in her own words:

Why focus on the archaeology? Because it is the very materiality, the physicality, the toughness and durability of things and the way they insidiously slip and slide into every corner of our lives that makes them so compelling … We are continually making and remaking ourselves, with the help of things. I would argue that the past is no different in this respect. It’s through things that we can get at the people who made, used and ultimately discarded them—their projects of self-production are as wrapped up in stuff as our own. And always, wrapped up in these things, are fundamental questions about how we choose to be in the world, questions that structure our actions and reactions, questions that change and challenge how we think and what we feel. Questions and objects—the two mainstays of human experience. [p19-20]

Shipley’s approach succeeds masterfully. Because many of these objects—critical artifacts for the archaeologist but often also spectacular works of art for the casual observer—are rendered in full color in this striking edition, the reader is instantly hooked: effortlessly chasing the author’s captivating prose down a host of intriguing rabbit holes in pursuit of answers to the questions she has mated with these objects. Along the way, she showcases the latest scholarship with a concise treatment of a broad range of topics informed by the kind of multi-disciplinary research that defines twenty-first century historical inquiry.
This includes DNA studies of both cattle and human populations in an attempt to resolve the long debate over Etruscan origins. While Herodotus and legions of other ancient and modern detectives have long pointed to legendary migrations from Anatolia, it turns out that the Etruscans are likely autochthonous, speaking a pre-Indo European language that may possibly be related to the one spoken by Ötzi, the mummified iceman, thousands of years ago. Shipley also takes the time to explain how it is that we can read enough of the Etruscan alphabet to decipher proper names while remaining otherwise frustrated in efforts aimed at meaningful translation. Much that we identify as Roman was borrowed from Etruria, but as Rome assimilated the Etruscans over the centuries, their language was left behind. Later, Etruscan literature—like all too much of the classical world—fell victim to the zeal of early Christians in campaigns to purge any remnants of paganism. Most offensive in this regard were writings that described the practices of the “haruspex,” a specialist who sought to divine the future by examining the livers of sacrificial animals, an Etruscan ritual later integrated into Roman religious practices. Texts of haruspices appear prominently in the “hit lists” drawn up by Christian thinkers Tertullian and Arnobius.
My favorite chapter is entitled “Super Rich, Invisible Poor,” which highlights the inevitable distortion that results from the attention paid to the exquisite art and grave goods of the wealthy elite at the expense of the sizeable majority of the inhabitants of a dozen city-states comprised of numerous towns, villages and some larger cities with populations thought to number in the tens of thousands. Although, to be fair, this has hardly been deliberate: there remains a stark scarcity in the archaeological record of the teeming masses, so to speak. While it may smack of the cliché, the famous aphorism "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" should be triple underscored here! The Met’s Monteleone Chariot, originally part of an elaborate chariot burial, makes an appearance in this chapter, but perhaps far more fascinating is a look at the great complex of workshops at a site called Poggio Civitate, more than a hundred miles from Monteleone, where skilled craftspeople labored to produce a whole range of goods in the same century that chariot was fashioned. But what of those workers? There seemed to be no trace of them. You can clearly detect the author’s delight as she describes recent excavations that uncovered remains of a settlement that likely housed them. Shipley returns again and again to her stated objective of connecting the material culture to the living Etruscans who were once integral to it.
Another chapter worthy of superlatives is “Sex, Lives and Etruscans.” While it is tempting to impose modern notions of feminism on earlier peoples, Etruscan women do seem to have had claimed lives of far greater independence than their classical contemporaries in Greece and Rome. And there are also compelling hints at an openness in sexuality—including wife-sharing—that horrified ancient observers who nevertheless thrilled in recounting licentious tales of wicked Etruscan behavior! Shipley describes tomb art that depicts overt sex acts with multiple partners, while letting the reader ponder whether legendary accounts of Etruscan profligacy are given to hyperbole or not.
In addition to beautiful illustrations and an engaging narrative, this volume also features a useful map, a chronology, recommended reading, and plenty of notes. It is rare that any author can so effectively tackle a topic so wide-ranging in such a compact format, so Shipley deserves special recognition for turning out such an outstanding work. The Etruscans rightly belongs on the shelf of anyone eager to learn more about a people who certainly made a vital contribution to the history of western civilization.
5 people found this helpful
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Ballet Fan
1.0 out of 5 stars This author is an incredible bore!
Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2020
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I had high hopes for this book, but found it exceedingly disappointing on account of the author's incessant moralizing, poor English usage, and reliance on contemporary jargon which she, no doubt, regards as trendy. There are much better books about the Etruscans. Don't waste your money on this one. About the only thing this book has going for it is the high quality of its illustrations, which in some cases were insufficient in number to elucidate the text.
13 people found this helpful
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Kay Holloway
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, wonderful!
Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2022
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This is a wonderful book on the Etruscans. The author is a wonderful lecturer. That's why I bought the book even though there have been new archeological discoveries since this was published in 2016.
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Top reviews from other countries

Martin Davies
3.0 out of 5 stars Wokeing the dead
Reviewed in Spain on June 1, 2022
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First the good: This is an easy-to-read, up-to-date survey of Europe's most mysterious civilisation, with a sprinkling of nice photos and some interesting points about how we look at the past via objects left behind by a tiny fraction of wealthier citizens. With regard to the map, two stars only as many sites were omitted, including several key ones discussed at length in the text. (And why leave out Florence and Siena, essential bearings for all but the most committed Tuscanologist?) Now the bad: Dr Shipley, like all feminist (art) historians is an excessively judgmental writer and academic, attacking the entire sweep of human civilisation and homing in here on those who have attempted to throw light on the Etruscans in previous ages: the usual story of "presentism" gone politically bananas (everything before Woke-up zero hour denigrated and dismissed as if from an intellectual abyss). Each chapter starts off innocently enough, with innocuous observations about the mural or work of art under consideration, before Dr Lucy's inner proselytiser grabs the mike and starts laying about earlier authorities and commentators, Livy, Shakespeare and all the “usual culprits" (white males, surprise surprise) who dared put stylus/quill/fountain pen to wax/papyrus/paper and/or be inspired by the handful of known Etruscan celebrities. Shipley's aggressiveness is as palpable as the charges she makes are unmerited, in almost all cases. Furthermore, in each chapter several paragraphs are taken up with mini-rants directed at colonialism, imperialism, binary gender (no kidding), and Isis ("It's a long, long way to Tarquinia"), to mention a few of the hotter woke potatoes covered in this slender volume – ostensibly about Etruscans and the prehistory of central Italy. This is a shame, as Shipley clearly loves the culture and has some interesting things to say about it. The editors have also slipped up - Reaktion should really have taken out their little blue pencils a little more often, or at least given their 'Lost Civilizations' series a more honest and accurate label, e.g. "Feminist and Politically Correct Harangues Loosely Based Around the Irresistible Subject of Lost Civilizations, Guarantor of High Sales". But such is the matrix of the Amazonian ascendancy sweeping through everything – publishers' boardrooms included – busily dismantling the West while regurgitating Frankfurt/feminist dogmas soaked up in student days, and indoctrinating the public via 'easy-to-read' books with lots of seductive colour illustrations. The headlong scramble onto soapboxes, however, risks boring and alienating intelligent readers of both – or even all – sexes, who end up dreading the next oh-so-superior sermon on things they've heard a million times already. More history, less homily – please!
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frances madsen
5.0 out of 5 stars I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it
Reviewed in Canada on February 12, 2018
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I have already written my product review. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it. My item was received promptly and was as described. Thanks again. A first rate book dealer.
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BN
5.0 out of 5 stars Etruscans brought to life
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 1, 2018
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I enjoyed reading this book. It is well written, cleverly structured and beautifully illustrated.
Mystery has always surrounded the Etruscans. Few written records survive from their era, and their language is little understood, so much of our knowledge comes from archaeology. This could make for rather dull reading, but somehow the author manages to bring the mysterious Etruscans to life. She has divided the book into chapters about specific aspects of Etruscan life, including their social hierarchies, ethnic origins, the lives of women, trade and commerce, religion, and even sex. Throughout each chapter there are references to relevant writings, from Roman historians and poets, through Chaucer and Shakespeare, to D.H. Lawrence. And there are numerous well-chosen analogies with more recent history.
I was fortunate to have finished the book just before a recent trip to Florence. On the spur of the moment we took 20-minute bus ride from the heat and crowds of the city to the hillside town of Fiesole, which has an impressive Roman amphitheatre alongside earlier Etruscan ruins, and a small museum full of Etruscan artefacts. All of this was so much more interesting having read the book (just as our next trip to the British Museum will be).
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Sarah
3.0 out of 5 stars OK
Reviewed in Canada on March 1, 2019
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(arrived quickly and in perfect condition, so review for the seller is 5!)

An okay overview of the Etruscan world. I felt however that in an effort to flesh out her narrative, the author goes on far too many diatribes of little relevance to the subject -- discussing Etruscan imagery in the movie 'The Omen', for example, or that Napoleon's brother (in law? My eyes glazed over) was an important figure in the resurgence of interest in things Etruscan, which went on for multiple pages. Mildly interesting, but it ultimately felt like a space-filler. For such a nice publication, and for a culture which is almost entirely represented by its material culture, I would have thought there'd be more images to examine, especially given multiple instances when the author's descriptions were lacking and her claims that arguments were 'undeniably' true when I wasn't remotely convinced. Finally, her blanket acceptance that images would mean the same to a modern audience as they would have to the intended audience cries for the intervention of semiotic theory, but I admit that may be a higher level method than was intended for her general audience. Still, if you have no prior knowledge of the Etruscans and are looking for a light read, this is a good place to start.
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