Italy and Western Europe

As in Greece, in Italy too in the first half of the 1st millennium BC a transition took place to an urbanized civilization with knowledge of an alphabetic script. But it occurred later than in the Greek world and was for the time being limited to only a few areas. The Italian peninsula was inhabited by various peoples who had settled there in the course of the 2nd millennium BC and had partially mixed with the older Neolithic populations. The more important among these peoples were the speakers of closely related Indo-European dialects, the Italic peoples, as they are called by modern scholars. Among them various subgroups can be distinguished, especially the Latins in the area of Latium on the coast of Central Italy southeast of the Tiber, the Umbrians in the Apennine region of Central Italy, and the Samnites in the mountainous inland regions of the south. Apart from them, and constituting a linguistic category of their own, were the Etruscans in present-day Tuscany. Presumably, the first Etruscans had settled here from somewhere in the Aegean region, possibly from western Asia Minor, in the 12th or 11th century BC, and had probably mixed with indigenous groups; as a separate nation, they emerged in the 8th century BC. In the centuries after the turn of the millennium, migrations continued: some Italic groups probably crossed over into Sicily (if not already in the later 2nd millennium BC); the Carthaginians established posts on the western side of Sicily and on Sardinia; Celts occupied parts of northern Italy; peoples related to the Illyrians colonized parts of the eastern coastal regions; and since around 750 BC, Greeks settled on the coasts of Sicily and southern Italy.

The migrations from the east to Italy fit the pattern of an east-west movement of peoples, animals, and crops that had characterized the Mediterranean from the start of the Neolithic. Probably, the Etruscans introduced the knowledge of iron and iron working; the Greeks brought with them, among many other things, their version of the alphabet. The transition to an urbanized culture took place both in the Etruscan and in the Greek territories. In that process, the Greeks as a rule presented the models that were followed by the Etruscans.