Christ.  There can be no doubt, therefore, that the civilisation of Egypt must at this period have been spread by commerce or war among the Western nations, and produced a powerful influence upon the Etruscans.  The imitation of Egyptian models is not so decided in this tomb as it is in the painted tombs of Tarquinii and other Etruscan cities of later date; and this circumstance would indicate that it was constructed at the very commencement of the intercourse of Etruria with Egypt.  If we take this historic fact as the limit in one direction, the tomb cannot be older than three thousand three hundred years.  On the other hand, we know that Veii was destroyed about four hundred years before Christ, and remained uninhabited and desolate till the commencement of the Empire; we have, therefore, the surest ground for fixing the date of the tomb prior to that event.  Somewhere between the invasion of Egypt by the Etruscan confederacy and the fall of Veii—­that is, somewhere between the fourteenth and the fourth century before Christ—­this sepulchre was hewn in the rock and its tenants interred in it.

Carlo Avolta of Corneto on one occasion, opening an Etruscan tomb at Tarquinii, saw a most wonderful sight.  From an aperture which he had made above the door of the sepulchre he looked in, and for fully five minutes “gazed upon an Etruscan monarch lying on his stone bier, crowned with gold, clothed in armour, with a shield, spear, and arrows by his side.”  But as he gazed the figure collapsed, and finally disappeared; and by the time an entrance was made all that remained was the golden crown, some fragments of armour, and a handful of gray dust.  Like that Etruscan tomb has been the fate of the Etruscan confederacy.  This mighty people left traces of their civilisation “inferior in grandeur perhaps to the monuments of Egypt, in beauty to those of Greece, but with these exceptions surpassing in both the relics of any other nation of remote antiquity.”  At the period of their highest power they lived in close neighbourhood and connection with a people who got its laws, its rulers, its arts, its religion from them—­and might therefore if only in gratitude have preserved their history.  But their fate was that of the similar civilisation of Mexico and Peru, which its selfish Spanish conquerors instead of preserving sought studiously to obliterate.  The comprehensive history of Etruria written in twenty volumes by the emperor Claudius—­who, though very feeble in other things, was yet a scholar, and could have given us much interesting information—­perished.  Their language, which survived their absorption by Rome, almost as late as the time of the Caesars, finally disappeared; and though thousands of inscriptions in tombs and on works of art remain—­which we are able to read from the close resemblance of the alphabet to the Greek—­the key to the interpretation of the language is gone beyond recall.  In an age that has unravelled the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and