[Sidenote: Female kinship among the Etruscans.] Another European, though apparently not Aryan, people among whom the system of female kinship appears to have prevailed were the Etruscans. For in Etruscan sepulchral inscriptions the name of the mother of the deceased is regularly recorded along with or even without the name of the father; and where the names of both father and mother are mentioned, greater prominence is given to the mother’s name by writing it in full, whereas the father’s name is, in accordance with Roman usage, merely indicated by an initial.[937] The statement of Theopompus that among the Etruscans sexual communism was a recognised practice, and that paternity was unknown,[938] may be only an exaggerated way of saying that they traced their descent through their mothers and not through their fathers. Yet apparently in Etruria, as elsewhere, this system of relationship was combined with a real indifference to fatherhood and with the dissolute morals which that indifference implies; for Etruscan girls were wont to earn a dowry by prostitution.[939] In these customs the Etruscans resembled the Lydians, and the similarity confirms the common opinion of antiquity, which modern historians have too lightly set aside, that the Etruscans were of Lydian origin.[940] However that may be, in considering the vestiges of mother-kin among the Latins, we shall do well to bear in mind that the same archaic mode of tracing descent appears to have prevailed among the neighbouring Etruscans, who not only exercised a powerful influence on Rome, but gave her two, if not three, of her kings.[941]