As to origins, the Etruscans might have been indigenous, or come down over the Alps, or, as most of the ancients believed, have come by sea from Asia Minor. The difference of their burial customs and, probably, their language from those of their neighbors makes it unlikely that their ruling class was native like, for example, the Villanovans; the archaeological evidence for their links with the North is very late, and the Northern theory has tended to fall along with the discrediting of Pigorini’s notions (based, as we saw, on unwarranted reconstruction of the _terremare_) about a single line of descent for Etruscan and Italic peoples. There remains the theory of Near Eastern origin, first stated in the fifth century B.C. by the Greek historian Herodotus, and recently (in the 1930’s) given some slight support by Italian excavators’ discovery of an inscription dated about 600 B.C. on the island of Lemnos, off the coast of Asia Minor opposite Troy. Though the Lemnian dialect is non-Indo-European, and therefore, like Etruscan, cannot be read, its archaic letters can be transliterated. Beginning with the bottom center line (Fig. 2.1), continuing with the line on the far left, and reading _boustrophedon_ (alternately from right to left and from left to right, like an ox plowing), it reads _evistho zeronaith zivai/ sialchveiz aviz/ maraz mav/ vanalasial zeronai morinail/ aker tavarzio/ holaiez naphoth ziazi_. The resemblance to the alphabet and the art-forms of the Aules Feluskes stele from Etruscan Vetulonia (Fig. 2.2) is obvious. The particular letter-form transcribed as _th_ occurs elsewhere only in Phrygia in Asia Minor. The very words and word-endings of the Lemnian stele can be found on Etruscan inscriptions. Thus the inscription shows at the very least that on an island “geographically intermediate between Asia Minor and Italy a language very similar to Etruscan was employed by some persons.” The ancient tradition localizing the original home of the Etruscans somewhere in or near northwest Asia Minor receives here some archaeological support. [Illustration: FIG. 2.1 Lemnos. Inscription in local dialect, similar to Etruscan. (M. Pallottino, _Etruscologia_, Pl. 4)] [Illustration: FIG. 2.2 Vetulonia. Aules Feluskes stele. (M. Pallottino, _Etruscologia_, Pl. 21)] But the important thing is not where they came from, but how their culture was formed. The archaeological evidence justifies the hypothesis that they were a small but vigorous military aristocracy from the eastern Mediterranean, established in central Italy, where they built, by borrowing and merging, upon a structure created by the Villanovans. A new approach, the analysis of bones from Etruscan tombs to ascertain the blood types of their ancient occupants, may, by comparison with the persistent blood types of modern Tuscans, enable the archaeologist to determine what proportion of the ancient population was native and what intrusive.