Note 37 — Chapter I · JOURNEY FROM CONSTANTINOPLE TO KÓNIA.

See Lanzi, Saggio di Lingua Etrusca. There is nothing, however, very surprising in this peculiarity of the Etruscan. The Greek alphabet, like its oriental prototype, was at first written from right to left, then indifferently either way, then alternately, in the manner called boustrophedon; and lastly, from left to right. It was imported into Etruria at a period when it was written in the earliest manner; and the Etruscans, by a practice often observable in colonies, seem to have adhered to the custom after it had been altered in the mother country.

It can no longer be doubted, from a comparison of the military architecture and other arts of the Etruscans with those of the Greeks, as well as from that of their language and writing, so ably investigated by Lanzi, that the two people had a common origin, or a common source of civilization. This source, in the opinion of the Greeks, was a people called Pelasgi, the last seat of whose prosperity was the country adjacent to the Thessalian Olympus. Driven away from thence about the fifteenth century before the Christian æra, they migrated to Asia, Crete, Epirus, and a part of them to Etruria; where they are said to have been joined, about two centuries afterwards, by a colony from Lydia. We find an evidence of the skill of the Pelasgi in military architecture, in the circumstance of the Athenians having employed some of those who were settled in Attica to fortify the Acropolis: and it is probable that the peculiar style of building exhibited in the walls of many ancient cities, as well in Greece as in Etruria and Italy, and which is the same in all, had its origin in the Pelasgic school. Hellanicus of Lesbus, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, denied that the Etruscans had ever been colonized from Lydia: but in this they were opposed to the general opinion of antiquity, as shown by Herodotus, Strabo, Paterculus, Pliny, Seneca, Plutarch, Appian, Justin, and Tacitus. At the time of the War of Troy, the Pelasgi possessed the fertile plains on the south-eastern side of Mount Ida, and had given the name of the Thessalian Larissa to their chief town. Hom. Il. β. 840. Several other communities in the surrounding parts of Asia Minor were of Pelasgic origin, and Lydia is said to have received one of their colonies. (Plutarch in Romulo, Raoul Rochette Hist. des Colonies Grecques.) Etruria, therefore, in its manners, arts, language, and writing, could not have been very much altered by the addition of a Lydian colony, if any such event ever took place. Among the numerous instances of resemblance between the Etruscan and Æolic Greek adduced by Lanzi, I shall mention one only, as it is illustrated by a discovery of my own. 𐌀𐌐𐌋𐌖 Aplu, we find, by some of the monuments of Etruria, to have been the Etruscan name for Apollo; and Plato, in a passage of the Cratylus referred to by Lanzi, observes that Ἀπλοῦν or Ἀπλὸς was the name of the Thessalian Apollo. Between Larissa and Mount Olympus, in the part of Thessaly which, as late as the time of the Roman empire, was called Pelasgiotis, I found two marbles inscribed with dedications to this deity, ΑΠΛΟΥΝΙ. See Lanzi Saggio di Lingua Etrusca, tomo 2. p. 200, 224; Walpole’s Collection of Travels in Turkey, vol. 2. p. 506; Classical Journal, No. 52.