Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Between approximately 900 and 100 BCE, the Etruscan civilization flourished in central Italy — in the region still called Tuscany, from Etruria. They were the dominant power in Italy before Rome, their cities (Tarquinia, Veii, Vulci, Caere, Arezzo) wealthy from trade in copper, iron, and wine. They gave Rome much of what Rome would later claim as its own: the arch, the toga, the gladiatorial games, the religious practice of reading the future in the entrails of sacrificed animals (haruspicy), and three of Rome's early kings. And then they disappeared — absorbed, conquered, and gradually assimilated into the Roman world until their language ceased to be spoken and their identity was subsumed. What survives of them is primarily funerary: the extraordinary painted tombs of Tarquinia, whose frescoes show a people of remarkable vitality and joy; the bronzes of astonishing quality; the terracotta sarcophagi whose reclining figures display the same easy intimacy with death that their art ...