Etruscan society
The interment chambers also were stocked with furniture, luxury items and jewelry, which are unlikely to have been available to the ordinary citizen.
The Etruscans did not always own sufficient wealth to support necropolises for their chief men and stock them with expensive items to be smashed and thrown away.
People of the Villanovan culture lived in poor huts concomitant with subsistence agriculture and owned plain and simple implements.
In the 8th century BC, the orientalizing period began, a time of influx of luxuriously living Greeks.
By the 7th century they had imported methods and materials from the eastern Mediterranean and were leaving written inscriptions.
The lids of large numbers of sarcophagi (for example, the "Sarcophagus of the Spouses") are adorned with sculpted couples, smiling, in the prime of life (even if the remains were of persons advanced in age), reclining next to each other or with arms around each other.
It is possible that Greek and Roman attitudes to the Etruscans were based on a misunderstanding of the place of women within their society.
In both Greece and Republican Rome, respectable women were mostly confined to the house and mixed-sex socialising did not occur.
Sometimes males are identified with a matronymic, thus leaving some doubt as to whether early Etruscan society was patrilinear.
Recorded names are minimally binomial: Vethur Hathisna, Avile Repesuna, Fasti Aneina.
The nomen gentile was formed in a number of ways, most often with a -na suffix, -nas in south Etruscan (possibly the genitive case).
The suffixed nomen might refer to an individual of the family: Arnth/Arnth-na, spure/spuri-na; or it might be a mythological figure: usil/usel-na; or a geographic location: Velch/Vels-na.
[7] The serious study of nomina gentilia is just beginning, due to the accumulation of sufficient names on which to base hypotheses.
A family might be concentrated at one location or appear in a number of cities, and be spelled in as many as a dozen different ways.
The Romans themselves identified a good many gentes at Rome that were originally Etruscan and since then scholars have spotted more.
Females could state that they were the daughter of a father, sec or sech, and the wife of a husband, puia.
In addition to the mi (“I”) an individual recognized a clan (“son”) or a sec (“daughter”), a neftś' (“grandson”), and a prumaths (“great-grandson”).
It is difficult to determine whether neftś means "grandson" or "nephew" although there could be cross-cultural contamination here with Latin nepōs (< IE *nepōts) which derives from a kinship system anthropologists call the Omaha type.
The lack of a sister does not fit;[citation needed] however, construction of the Etruscan dictionary is still in progress.
The historical Etruscans had achieved a state system of society, with remnants of the chiefdom and tribal forms.
It is believed that the Etruscan government style changed from total monarchy to oligarchic democracy (as the Roman Republic) in the 6th century BC.
Etruscan texts name quite a number of magistrates, without much of a hint as to their function: the camthi, the parnich, the purth, the tamera, the macstrev, and so on.
In the case of danger the league could appoint a dictator (macstrna/mastarna) to lead them, a practice that was later copied by the Romans.
It is entirely possible that the Tarquins appealed to Lars Porsena of Clusium (Clevsin), because he was the head of the Etrurian commonwealth for that year.
