Word: etruscan
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...flap-footed, tank-bearing skindivers have opened a new frontier in archaeology. Last week Piero Nicola Gargallo, 30, a skindiving Italian marquis, was telling how he found the ancient Etruscan seaport of Pyrgi. On the Tyrrhenian coast just north of Rome, the city is known from historical records, but only minor traces have been found on dry land...
Little is known about the Etruscans, a talented, highly civilized people who ruled Rome from about 600 B.C. to 500 B.C. The Etruscan written language has not been deciphered, and even the origin of the people, supposedly in Asia Minor, is known from tradition only. The Romans took over much of their culture but were ostentatiously shocked by their sexual customs, e.g., Etruscans sometimes made love at the dinner table, and young girls earned their dowries by prostitution...
Most of these drowned cities are unexplored and unaccounted for. No one knows how their ruins got so deep underwater; the general level of the Mediterranean has risen only a fraction of an inch since glacial times. Gargallo hopes that his underwater ruins may hold the answer to some Etruscan mysteries. "Water," he says, "is destructive, but it can also preserve. Mud gives protection from time, weather and greedy hands. If the sea bottom is undisturbed, some relics last almost indefinitely...
Disguising themselves as American tourists with cigars and cameras as props, contraband officers called at the fashionable antique shop of "F. Renn-Rain-world famous and unique," just below Rome's Spanish Steps. There was nothing Etruscan to be seen, but the salesman steered them around the corner to a 17th century palace at No. 77 Via della Croce. First, the officers put a watch on No. 77, keeping an eye on middlemen entering and purchasers leaving the place. Last week officers raided No. 77 and confiscated what they called the "greatest hoard of looted archaeological treasures ever found...
...gown, he mourned: "Nonsense, nonsense, it's a small collection of little things. So I let my friends come to look at my collection. So I let them buy a few things. So I export something to America once in a while. What is all this talk about Etruscan antiquities? Nobody can prove the Etruscans even existed...