Death and burial

Cemeteries are our greatest source of knowledge of the Etruscans, because the Etruscan elite furnished their tombs very richly, a “barbarian” custom that they adopted throughout their civilization, from the second half of the eighth century BCE onward. The three major arts—sculpture, architecture, and painting—were developed mostly for use in burials. Although (or because) this constitutes a huge amount of information, a detailed study of death and burial in Etruria is still lacking; the various reviews of aspects of the whole subject, usually involving a single site or a particular period in history, show that the development of a funerary ideology is closely connected to contemporary religion and society. Funerary ideology is a traditional and conservative matter. Up-to-date analyses of single sites specifically concern the Iron Age and the Orientalizing period, while the more complex Archaic and Late Archaic periods are less well known. From the Classical period onward the emergence of a precise view of the underworld can be followed, influenced by Greek conceptions of its geography: the ferryman Charon, ferrying the dead across the river Acheron to the hereafter, was adopted as Charun in Etruscan culture, where further male and female demons of their own peopled the underworld.