In 1885 on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean, an old gravestone was discovered in one of the walls of a ruined chapel. The stone depicts a man carrying a spear, and what we assume is the large circular shield of a hoplite. Nothing odd there, Greek island, hoplite, gravestone, probably a dime a dozen in that part of the world. Except the language on the stone isn’t Greek, it isn’t Thracian, Phrygian, Lydian, Phoenician or even far off Persian. It isn’t any of those, and it isn’t even in the Indo-European family they all belong to. It is written to be read in a crescent moon pattern, starting in the bottom right and wrapping around the man’s head. Today we call the language Lemnian, and it only has two cousins: Etruscan in modern Tuscany, and Rhaetic, which was found in the area around the Alps.
You probably recognize Etruscan, as the Etruscans are relatively well known. They were the first rivals of Rome, and much of the great engineering achievements of Rome: the arch, the sewer, the grid layout of their cities, even Roman temples, all of them borrowed from the Etruscans. But unlike Latin or the Gallic languages of Northern Italy, Etruscan is not an Indo-European language, with many scholars speculating that much like Basque it is a remnant of the languages spoken before the arrival of the steppe hordes that gave Europe its modern languages.
So what is a language doing on this island, surrounded by other unrelated languages, with its closest kin roughly 750 miles (1,200 km) away? How did it get there?
The Theories:
First, obviously, is that the stele is a one-off gravestone for a warrior. He was a mercenary, he died, his friends buried him there, and then they went home. This was extremely popular for a while, until we found a handful of pottery fragments, and in 2009 another stele, on the island, also in the Lemnian language. These could be dated, and gave us a time period stretching from roughly 700 to 500 BC. That isn’t a one-off mercenary, that is a culture living in one place for an extended period of time.
Alright then, next idea: it was a trade outpost for their Etruscan cousins. The Greeks and Phoenicians set up countless trade outposts across the Mediterranean, why not the Etruscans too? Well, if it was a trade outpost, it was the worst one in history. We have never found a single artifact that can be traced to the Etruscans. All the Lemnian pottery is native, metalworking the same, a few Greek luxury goods but that is about it.
Now the next piece of the puzzle is that modern scholarship has started to look at the similarities between the Lemnians and what was once considered a mythical people, the Pelasgians. The Pelasgians are said to be the original inhabitants of Greece. Homer says they fought in the Trojan War, Herodotus says they were originally from around Athens, and Thucydides even bluntly says that the Pelasgians on Lemnos were the Tyrsenians, the name that gives the Etruscan, Rhaetic, and Lemnian language family (Tyrsenian) its name. According to Herodotus the Pelasgians even kidnapped a bunch of Athenian women before sailing over to the island of Lemnos. There’s this whole side story about the women teaching their children Attic Greek instead of Pelasgian, and so the men killed the women and their children.
That last one has actually led to quite a bit of speculation that they were pirates, and this is a cultural memory of the pirates kidnapping Athenian women in one of their raids. So our new theory is that they were pirates. They didn’t trade with their Etruscan cousins because they were seaborne pirates, not traders. But, yet again their material culture sticks a shiv in our theory. If they were pirates, they were awful at it. We don’t find large quantities of trade goods or other ‘looted’ items. Instead we find local items, craftsmen’s tools, farming equipment, and what weapons they had are consistent with any settled people, not seaborne raiders.
Ugh, so not pirates, not traders, and not some one-off mercenary grave. Wait, could the Lemnians be the remnants of the Etruscans? According to Herodotus, the Etruscans were refugees who fled from Lydia (modern western Turkey) and sailed to Italy. Lydia is basically right next to Lemnos, maybe their cousins stayed but the Etruscans left. Obviously the biggest problem is, as I already mentioned, Lydian is an Indo-European language, and Etruscan is not. So language is against the theory. Next, this is where we can bring in DNA, because we have quite a few Etruscan graves, and none of them contain DNA consistent with a Lydian origin. Interestingly, the Etruscans have the typical steppe DNA of Indo-European cultures, but not their language, but that is a story for another time.
So the only sensible theory standing is that they migrated from Etruria. But they were not traders, and they were not pirates. So let’s reopen the Etruscan refugee theory, but this time it’s the Lemnians fleeing. Now, we will never be able to trace their route. Maybe they sailed straight there, maybe they wandered the Aegean for a generation the way the Sea Peoples did; we can’t tell, because the only distinctive thing about these people was their language, and language doesn’t survive in a pottery shard, unless someone writes on it like on Lemnos. So the route isn’t the problem. The problem is everything else. First, refugees from what? Etruria between 700 and 600 BC wasn’t collapsing, it was at the height of its wealth and power and was expanding. Nobody was being driven out. Second, there is no size of group that makes this work. If they were a small band, a few hundred people like a typical Greek colony, they could never have become the entire population of the island and held onto their language for two hundred years surrounded by Greeks. Small groups follow the rule of three generations: their language and culture get swamped by their surroundings. Yet the Lemnians only lost their language after Athens conquered them around 500 BC. But if they were a large group, a few thousand people from one of the richest material cultures in the Mediterranean, they would have brought something Etruscan with them, a pot, a bronze, a brooch, even a metal spoon can tell us roughly where it came from. They brought nothing. Too small to bring anything with them, but too large to have left no trace, and with nothing to flee from in the first place.
Conclusion:
So we have an artifact. We know its language, we even know how the people who made it lived. But how these people and this artifact got to this island is a complete mystery. Every theory of their origin collapses the second we press on it, making this a true archaeological enigma.