The Etruscans: everything you wanted to know

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Lasting from the 9th century BC, right up until Roman conquests in the 1st century BC. The Etruscans were a powerful ancient civilization, who inhabited Etruria in ancient Italy, and rubbed shoulders with the other iconic ancient cultures of their day. Often painted as a mysterious people whose story is largely vanished from our view, researcher Lucy Shipley instead presents us with a very different picture of the Etruscans.

She speaks to Emily Briffitt to reveal more. As with all of our Everything You Wanted to Know episodes, we've had a lot of questions from our listeners. Now, some people have heard of the Etruscans, other people have not, some people might be familiar, some might not. Give us a 60-second brief introduction. Who were they?

Who are we talking about? In kind of just a minute's style, the Etruscans were a people who lived in central Italy during the first millennium BC. They're kind of neighbors and rivals of the Romans and the Greeks, and they pop up in ancient sources quite often. But we only ever have accounts of them from that outside perspective, because their own texts do not survive. We know they were writing, something I'm sure will come on to later, but we do not have any kind of own voices accounts of the Etruscans that they've written of themselves.

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