The Etruscan people, who were a bit of a bridge between the ancient Greek world and the emerging Roman world long ago, remain a historical enigma in so many ways.
Fans of Jeopardy may recall that “Those Darn Etruscans” was the tongue in cheek title for categories dealing with these people whose works are not yet fully understood.
TINIA – The Chief of the Etruscan deities, like Zeus to the Greeks and Jupiter to the Romans. In the Etruscan creation myth Tinia separated the Earth from the sky and delineated borders between nations. Tinia ruled the sky and wielded three sorts of lightning bolts – one sort for warnings, one sort for intervening in affairs of gods or men for good or ill and one sort for inflicting catastrophes.
Unlike Zeus or Jupiter, Tinia needed the consent of a Council of the Gods (Dii Consentes) in order to wield the second and third categories of lightning bolts. There were separate deities who wielded other classifications of thunderbolts but they wielded only one category each, not three like Tinia. Continue reading
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