The city of Vulci in central Italy was an important urban center for the Etruscans in early antiquity, as evidenced by two monumental temple buildings in this city. Archaeologists have now discovered the 2,500-year-old head of a marble statue of a woman there – a rare find for the Etruscan region. Even more interesting, however, is that this so-called kore was probably imported from Greece. It suggests that the Etruscans and Greeks had more extensive cultural relationships at the time than previously assumed.
In the period from 1200 BC to 100 AD, the Etruscan city-states dominated Tuscany and neighboring regions. This culture, which is still mysterious today, differed from the people of the surrounding regions in its art, language and also in its religious customs. The origins and origins of the Etruscan culture were unclear for a long time, but DNA analyzes of dead people from Etruscan necropolises now suggest that it was not founded by immigrants, but probably developed locally. The Etruscan cities of central Italy, which formed the League of Twelve Cities from 600 BC onwards, were among the most important urban centers in the country in pre-Roman times.
New find in the second temple of the Etruscan city of Vulci
One of these Etruscan cities is ancient Vulci in the Lazio region of Italy. Archaeologists from the universities of Mainz and Freiburg have been carrying out excavations there since 2020 as part of the “Vulci Cityscape” project to research the urban structure of the Etruscan city. In 2022, the team discovered a second monumental temple near the Tempio Grande in Vulci. “The new temple has approximately the same dimensions and a similar orientation as the neighboring Tempio Grande, which was built at the same time in the Archaic period,” explains Mariachiara Franceschini from the University of Freiburg. The two temples form a kind of sacred quarter in a central location on the city plateau. Such a duplication of monumental buildings in an Etruscan city is rare and speaks for the importance of the city of Vulci in Etruscan times, according to the archaeologists.
Now Franceschini and her colleagues report a new find in Vulci: During further excavations in the area of the second temple of the Etruscan city, the team came across the head of a female marble statue. It depicts a young woman who is just under life-size with an elaborate hairstyle and a tiara in her hair. The head once belonged to a so-called Kore, a type of sculpture that traditionally showed young, upright women in elaborately designed clothing and served as a votive offering or grave monument, as the archaeologists explain. This is an extremely rare find, as only a handful of sculptures are known from the area, none of which have been preserved in a comparably outstanding quality.
Female sculpture came from Greece
But that’s not all: “In addition to the sculptural quality, the head impresses with its unique details that cannot be found in this form or only very rarely and make the Kore a very special find,” explains Paul Pasieka from the University of Mainz. Even remnants of the ancient painting have been preserved. These details reveal that the sculpture, probably created at the beginning of the 5th century, shows striking similarities to the Koren of the Athenian Acropolis. Apparently the female statue was not the Etruscans of Vulci’s own production, but an import from Greece. “We assume an Attic production that was exported to Etruria,” says Franceschini.
According to archaeologists, this unusual find suggests that Greeks and Etruscans were in closer cultural exchange 1600 to 1500 years ago than previously assumed. “The turn of the 6th to 5th centuries BC was a time of intense activity and cultural flourishing in both Greece and Etruria,” says Franceschini. So far, the finds of numerous painted Greek vases in Etruria have been evidence of this. The discovery of the Kore now suggests that the Etruscans even imported entire sculptures from Greece. “This find gives us a completely new picture of cultural interdependence,” the archaeologist continued. She and her team suspect that the kore was brought to the Etruscan city in connection with the construction of the second monumental temple from Vulci.
The researchers hope to gain further insights into the relationships between the Etruscans and Greeks and the role of the female statue from future excavations in the area of the new temple at Vulci. In addition, the structure and development of the city are being examined on a large scale using the most modern methods.
Source: Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz