Paint a pot like an ancient Etruscan

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1:56Dr Lucy Shipley:Be yourself and don't be afraid to make mistakes. That's what archaeologist Dr Lucy Shipley told me that we can take from the approach to life of the ancient Etruscans. Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. Some learning from the past that will help us today to live better, happier, healthier, or more productive lives.

2:28Dr Lucy Shipley:Lucy, hello. How are you? I'm really well, thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me to be on this podcast. I'm really excited about it and to share some life lessons from the people that I've studied and loved for a long time. I'm excited too. And we've just been having a bit of a pre-chat, so I know we're going to have some good stuff here. The topic we're talking about is the Etruscans. Now, regular listeners to the History Extra podcast, you may have heard a podcast about the Etruscans with Lucy already and my colleague Emily Griffith. Look up in the archive of the History Extra podcast for everything you want to know on the Etruscans for chapter and verse, but this is going to be a different one.

3:04Dr Lucy Shipley:Before we start our conversation proper, Lucy, just drop us in. Remind us who the Etruscans are, where and when. Sure. So the Etruscans are people of pre-Roman Italy. And their kind of heartlands, their main centre is the land between the River Tiber and the River Arno. So kind of Tuscany, Umbria, all those lovely places that people like to use for screensavers and go on holiday to that kind of beautiful rolling hills type of landscape. It's kind of in the back of your mind, although we know it's much more forested. But they also spread out. So their sphere of influence was really all the way from kind of Venice down to Naples.

3:35There are Etruscan inscriptions at Pompeii. They had this huge influence over a vast area of what's now modern Italy. They were trading with people as far away as kind of southern Germany, southern Spain. They had a bit of a love-hate relationship with classical Greece. So they're just kind of getting into all sorts of different areas, different places during this period. So in terms of time, we're really thinking about this first millennium BC. So Etruscan origins is something that you can hear about all on the other podcast. But today, I think what we're really going to be focusing on is thinking about that kind of orientalizing archaic and classical periods so kind of from about 750 BCE and I know I'm going to end up talking about an object that's in the first century BCE as well which is kind of after the Roman conquest in inverted commas of Etruria and so yeah that's where we are and that's when we are.

4:28Dr Lucy Shipley:Perfect so in terms of time and space we're going to have a bit of a crossover with classical Greece and and ancient Rome as well So those sort of civilizations probably come into play a bit as well. Now then, thank you for that. That set us up. What's your life lesson? What's the top line lesson that you are proposing we take from these Etruscan people? So my number one life lesson that I think the Etruscans have to teach us is that the most important thing in life is to be yourself and not be afraid to make mistakes and kind of not to be intimidated by other people around you. So we have just talked a little bit already about classical Greece and ancient Rome.

5:04So these two sort of big beasts of the popular imagination of the ancient world are right on either side of the Etruscans. And it's so easy to slip into this trap of seeing the Etruscans through those Greek or Roman eyes and not appreciate them for themselves. And I think you can see this with other cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. There's this tendency to view things through a kind of classical lens when actually these are these amazing prehistoric cultures on their own merits and they do extraordinary things. And if we can just let go of comparison, then we can really start to not only appreciate them and enjoy the amazing objects that they've left behind, but we can also understand them a bit more.

5:45So it's kind of quite important for the archaeologist to leave behind those preconceptions.

5:50Dr Lucy Shipley:Okay. Before we dive into that too much, one sort of immediate problem I see with this is that we can't understand their language, can we? We have records, we have some of their written language, but we don't fully understand what it is. So have I sold you a bit of a kipper here, asking you to speak about lessons from people who we're going to struggle to understand how they fought and acted, aren't we? Or are there ways into their minds? So as I've died in the world prehistoric archaeologists, I would absolutely argue that there are. And I think it's a wonderful opportunity to think about people without the kind of layers and layers of bias that texts will give you.

6:27I think that the way to approach this is really looking through the material culture. So looking at the artifacts, the things that the Etruscans have left behind and kind of moving from there. Because we can tell so much about people's lives, things that people felt were important by looking at the material that they've left behind, looking at the places that they created, looking at their burial rituals. But also they live in this world where they are literate. So sometimes you almost think, what could be out there? So I talked a lot in the podcast with Emily about missing Etruscan texts. So we know that they are reading and writing, but they're producing texts on these linen books that just don't survive.

7:11I think it's almost one of the great tragedies. It's up there. What was in the Library of Alexandria from Etruscan texts? So we know that they're producing these things. And we also know that they're thinking really deeply about all sorts of questions about life from the future, just from the way that they are portrayed in those historical texts. So by the time of the Emperor Claudius, he married an Etruscan woman, and he was so fascinated with the Etruscan past that he commissioned a huge history on the Etruscans. And they have this weird reputation as almost a little bit mysterious, because they had such a huge reputation as fortune tellers, augurs, people who could understand what was going to happen.

7:51There's this legend that supposedly it's an Etruscan soothsayer who tells Caesar not to go to the Senate on the Ides of March. Much later, the early Christians are still having problems with Etruscan fortune telling popping up. So these are people who are really thinking deeply about the world that they live in, observing really closely the signs that are all around them. And while we don't have texts where they describe their stoic philosophy or their hedonistic philosophy, I think when we look at the artefacts, we can really see some of those ideas and the way that they approached life writ large in those materials.

8:25Dr Lucy Shipley:so it's tantalizing that we don't have those texts and i suppose maybe maybe the lesson that we haven't talked about here the lesson uh for everybody is if you're going to write something write on something that's not going to decompose before you before people can have a chance to look at it well speaking with my day job hat on you digital decay and digital storage are real concerns you we're in increasingly digital world but what's going to happen in sort of a thousand years time are people going to be able to sort of read our hard drives and see all our internet explore a history. Is that creating just a ream of data that people are going to be able to access or not?

8:57How do you preserve your written legacy for the future if you want to? So that's a slight bit of a tangent, but it is still really interesting. And thinking again about texts, one of the sort of minor life lessons that I think the Etruscans have to teach is just by virtue of the way they're portrayed in Greek and Roman sources is usually they're there to do a job. They've got a kind of narrative function. Quite often that function is as the baddie. So why are certain people being depicted in certain ways? So when we're reading, you know, sit down and read the newspaper, walk past the petrol station forecourt, you can see all the headlines are there.

9:33Who's missing from that story? And why is that particular story being told? I think that's something that as an Etruscan archaeologist, you learn to live with quite early. So you've obviously got to get to know all these Greek and Latin authors, but you also have to kind of treat them with a bit of loving disrespect, if I can say that. You have to take it with a pinch of salt. And that's something that applies really well. You're scrolling through Instagram and you see God knows what video and you think, hang on a minute, what's not being shown here? So it's kind of, you don't want to be too like Tim Foyle, they're not telling us anything.

10:03But you just have to have a critical mind and critical thinking about the information that's being shared with you.

10:10Dr Lucy Shipley:Absolutely. Source criticism is key. Now you just mentioned your day job um uh for listeners who aren't aware what your day job is we should probably um just quickly clarify that anyone who's watching uh the video this might see that your gilet uh rather fashionably says Exmoor on it so so just quickly what's your day job oh super quickly so i'm the historic environment record officer for Exmoor National Park and that means i look after a large amount of data about all of the amazing archaeological sites within the national park but um yeah it's a fantastic job but the Etruscans will always be you know first in my heart so it's really great to be able to share all the things that they have to teach us with everybody today.

10:46Dr Lucy Shipley:And the only link between Exmoor and the Etruscans is that both start with E, sadly. We're on Sesame Street now. Okay, so clarified a few things there. So let's get back to that sort of be yourself and don't be afraid to get things wrong approach. How can we understand then? What artifacts might we draw upon to understand that message? So I am an out and out, unashamed pottery nerd. I love pottery. and my PhD is on Etruscan pottery and kind of trying to understand why huge amounts of Greek pottery, you know, the red and black figure pottery, that's kind of the icon, you know, that's what Disney depicted in Hercules coming to life, you know, that red and black figure pottery.

11:26Everybody knows that type of pottery, but the vast majority of the material surviving that we have of this pottery class comes from Etruscan tombs. So if it wasn't for the Etruscans, we wouldn't have a large amount of this material. And what I was trying to do is understand why do they want this stuff? Why is it important enough that they import it in huge numbers and then they place it with their debt? Why do you do that? And just comparing and contrasting Etruscan indigenous made pottery with that Greek pottery, and then trying to understand later the Etruscans start making their own painted pottery.

12:00So if we start with Etruscan, I'm really sorry, everybody, this is getting deep but Etruscan pottery is beautiful it's black and shiny and it is made to look like bronze so we're imitating bronze the Etruscans were incredible metal workers they have access to some fantastic ores in their area so they are really masters of bronze working but if you can't have bronze you want pottery that looks like bronze so that's what they're doing so this painted stuff from Greece with different colours it's like a whole different ball game it's totally almost alien and really, really different. And traditionally, there's been this idea that, oh, well, of course they wanted it because they could see that the Greeks were so culturally superior.

12:41But that really doesn't hold water with me. I don't think people just completely go out and adopt a whole new type of artifact just because they can inherently see that it's better when the functionality is very similar. So just kind of digging into that and trying to understand where this comes from. And that kind of led me down this avenue of Etruscan made, not imitations, but inspirations, shall we say, Greek inspired Etruscan pottery. So Etruscan black figure and Etruscan red figure. And particularly Etruscan red figure, there is this vast industry, they are churning these things out, there is a market for these things.

13:21But some of them are terrible. they are truly I try not to have value judgments about artifacts but some of this material looks like somebody has made it with an atrocious red wine hangover like there are some really epic ones with kind of the one that I'm really thinking of this one of an owl that looks like he's yeah he looks like the owls hung over let alone the potter but obviously this material was acceptable this was good enough and I think it's easy to kind of even I'm doing it I love Etruscan archaeology. I'm really passionate about it. But even I am almost laughing at this Etruscan red figure material.

13:59But they were perfectly happy with it. Who am I to go, oh, that's a bit rubbish, actually. Isn't that terrible? Just that way of being able to express yourself, do what you're going to do. You paint that pot, you paint that bad owl. OK, sometimes the human forms are a bit blobby. They're not as neat and precise as the ones that you see imported from Greece. But that's okay. That's absolutely fine. Somebody was very happy with that. And I think that's a really important lesson because I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Like I will go away and agonise probably about this podcast and think, oh, did you say this?

14:34Or did you say that? But actually, sometimes it's time to tell your internal monologue, your internal critic to shut up. And actually what you've done is totally fine. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good and just enjoy being yourself, painting your own pot in whatever milieu you're doing it and just owning it, being proud of what you can do rather than constantly comparing yourself to somebody else.

14:58Dr Lucy Shipley:Beautiful. So this is the message here is paint your own pot, right? Paint your own pot. Paint your own pot. Yeah. So this is a story of like pragmatism over perfectionism in some ways, I guess. Yeah, I think so. And I think that's something that almost holds true in all sorts of other areas of Etruscan archaeology as well. So the more I think about this, the more other places I see it. So I used to work at an amazing site called Podio Cipitate. It's just outside Siena. But if you go there today, you won't see very much. It's just a wooded hillside and this site was placed on the top of this hill.

15:32But back when it was a flourishing Etruscan site, this was home to one of the largest buildings of the ancient world. And it was a craft centre. So the excavators have termed it the workshop building and they have evidence that it burnt down in an accidental fire and it's so exciting because you can see that people just literally dropped what they were working on and got out before the flames came but the result is that you have this incredible preservation of all of this material they were working on and some of it's great you don't get me wrong some of it's really really beautiful high quality like carving and terracotta tiles and all sorts of other things.

16:11And some of it is really not so much. And there's that whole spectrum of what people were working on, all these different individuals working together in this place. So that's kind of another area that you can see this. Everybody's doing their best and that's OK. After that fire, they rebuild in just an adjacent area. They build this incredible complex which has these terracotta statues on the roof. and if you're somebody who is looking at say the Parthenon marbles you're going to think that these architectural terracottas are a little bit I don't want to say I don't want to use these words see all these words are kind of pejorative but they look a bit rustic like they're quite big and chunky and they they don't have that kind of classical refinement but they're so alive and they're really enchanting so the really famous one is this cowboy figure with this huge hat and he's seated on a throne on the roof.

17:07And you think, what would the impact of that have been on an ordinary Etruscan person approaching this site, this huge building with these imposing figures? There probably seem to be ancestors or important previous members of this elite family that's in charge here. What does that do to that person? They don't know what's going on elsewhere. They have nothing to compare it to. So it still does the job. There's just so many little examples like that where the Etruscan version of something is really special in its own terms. If we think about Etruscan tomb painting, it's another really good example.

17:42So I'm kind of standing on the shoulders of D.H. Lawrence here because he went to Etruria in the 1920s and 30s and he kind of fell in love with the Etruscans too. And okay, earlier art historians were not overawed by some of these Etruscan tomb paintings and they considered them kind of quite coarse, but they're so alive so the detail in them is just stunning so there's very famous the tomb of hunting and fishing at Tarquinia just has these representations of these beautiful birds other tombs just have all these different things the tomb of the bulls at Tarquinia has nine trees depicting different seasons so that kind of close observation of the natural world yeah we only have four seasons you know it's like children's picture book page of four different trees isn't it we've all you know anyone with a kid has had one of those books but it's just seeing the world for what it is and representing it as well and as passionately as you can.

18:33And we shouldn't be comparing them to anyone else. We should just be going, wow, these people are amazing on their own terms.

18:38Dr Lucy Shipley:I'm loving your passion for the subject, by the way. I think if there's a lesson, a lesson we can take is to be passionate about history. And that comes across in all these conversations, hopefully. So just quickly on this, Sue, do you get a sense then that these Etruscans, these people were good at not comparing themselves to other, like reducing that level of anxiety. Can we go that far or is that really stretching the limits of the evidence? That's a really, really good question. I think I'm going to stick my neck out here and I'm going to take a risk. And this could be my bias. As you said, I'm probably too passionate about the Etruscan.

19:12It's probably a little bit concerning. But I think if we look at their actions, we can see that these are confident, capable people who are absolutely viewing themselves as equal with the Greek people that they're trading with and other trading partners. So we have in the Greek text, we have records of the Etruscans kind of teaming up with the Phoenicians to, I'm going to say manage, but we've got evidence of sea battles taking place. They are fiercely defending their trading hubs along the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy. They are not just going to sit there and be like, oh, these wonderful people from the Eastern Mediterranean are coming.

19:47That's fine. You can have everything. They're totally unafraid to stand up for themselves. And again and again, in the Greek text, they're represented, they quite often get represented as pirates. There's a lovely story where Etruscan pirates kidnap the god Dionysus, and then he turns them into dolphins as they jump overboard. So these people were masters of the seas. Sometimes the Etruscans get termed a thalasocracy, like people who are ruling over the seas. And I think there's something in that. So they have these trading networks, they know their worth, they know their value. And I think when we think about unequal exchange, that's something I've been really interested in.

20:24What is the nature of exchange? Who defines whether that's unequal? So again, going back to the Greek pottery trade, there's this sort of, huh, the Etruscans are trading primary materials like metal ores for civilisation in the form of Greek pottery. But I don't think the Etruscans would have seen it like that. I think they would have seen themselves as getting what they wanted. If you're getting what you want, the trade is, it's hard to pin down exactly how that bargain has gone. You know, we don't have a time machine. I can't go back and talk to an Etruscan trader and say, hey, are you really happy with this or are you getting screwed over?

20:54But I think from looking at the way that they're continually depicted, these are not people who are looking at their own shadow. These are people who are confidently asserting their right to rule over large amounts of Italy, to dominate their neighbours, to have these trading networks extending for hundreds of miles. To what extent can you ever say that a people are in awe of their neighbours? I don't think they're intimidated by Greece or later Rome at all. And the story of Etruscan resistance to Rome is kind of one of those great, it's almost like a series of last stands. You know, it takes them a long time to take Etruria.

21:34Individual Etruscan cities fall one at a time. And we can see if you look at how different Etruscan cities respond to the threat of Rome, you can see really canny, intelligent responses to outside threats. So one Etruscan city at Cere, they decide quite early on to kind of position themselves as allies to Rome, and it's almost like a finishing school for Roman aristocrats. So they manage to really stay out of trouble, and they choose that route. Whereas other places like Tarquinia, and they suffer violence. The fall of Vey, 396 BC is kind of the beginning of the end for Etruscan independence, Etruscan domination.

22:11But it takes a long time. It's not like a switch suddenly flicks in 396 for a long time. And the Etruscans still retain a lot of the characteristics that we might see as really Etruscan. And going back to this idea about being yourself, something that we see continuing on is Etruscan funerary practice. So there's an inland city called QC. It's really beautiful. The museum's fantastic. Anyone who gets a chance to go should go. And they have a really long, hundreds of years tradition there of burial in these urns, which represent the person, the deceased on the top. And these gradually change from very stylised representations kind of seated on thrones with just a kind of mask and an ear.

22:55They're amazing. It's called zero burials, really worth a Google. And they end up being almost like these portrait urns, but they're not idealised portraits. They're quite realistic and they continue even after Rome is very much dominant over this Quesine area. So up in the British Museum, they've got a sarcophagus from Quesi of a lady called Sheanti Hanunia Tlesnasa. And she is represented in a really realistic way. Her face is quite youthful and they've done analysis on her skeleton. She died in her sort of early 50s, so she doesn't quite look like that anymore. But she's not an idealised form.