<P> The origins of the Etruscans are mostly lost in prehistory, although Greek historians as early as the 5th century BC repeatedly associated the Tyrrhenians (Turrhēnoi / Τυρρηνοί, Tursēnoi / Τυρσηνοί) with Pelasgians . Thucydides, Herodotus and Strabo all denote Lemnos as settled by Pelasgians whom Thucydides identifies as "belonging to the Tyrrhenians" (τὸ δὲ πλεῖστον Πελασγικόν, τῶν καὶ Λῆμνόν ποτε καὶ Ἀθήνας Τυρσηνῶν), and although both Strabo and Herodotus agree that Tyrrhenus / Tyrsenos, son of Atys, king of Lydia, led the migration, Strabo specifies that it was the Pelasgians of Lemnos and Imbros who followed Tyrrhenus / Tyrsenos to the Italian Peninsula . The Lemnian - Pelasgian link was further manifested by the discovery of the Lemnos Stele, whose inscriptions were written in a language which shows strong structural resemblances to the language of the Tyrrhenians (Etruscans). Dionysius of Halicarnassus records a Pelasgian migration from Thessaly to the Italian peninsula, noting that "the Pelasgi made themselves masters of some of the lands belonging to the Umbri"; Herodotus describes how the Tyrrheni migrated from Lydia to the lands of the Umbri (Ὀμβρικοί). </P> <P> Strabo as well as the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus make mention of the Tyrrhenians as pirates . Pliny the Elder put the Etruscans in the context of the Rhaetian people to the north and wrote in his Natural History (AD 79): </P> <P> Adjoining these the (Alpine) Noricans are the Raeti and Vindelici . All are divided into a number of states . The Raeti are believed to be people of Tuscan race driven out by the Gauls, their leader was named Raetus . </P> <P> Historians have no literature and no original Etruscan texts of religion or philosophy; therefore, much of what is known about this civilization derives from grave goods and tomb findings . An mtDNA study in 2007 suggested that the Etruscans were not related substantially to the Upper Paleolithic hunter - gatherer populations of Europe and that they showed no similarities to populations in the Near East . An earlier DNA study performed in Italy, however, partly gave credence to the theory of Herodotus, as the results showed that 11 minor mitochondrial DNA lineages extracted from different Etruscan remains occur nowhere else in Europe and are shared only with Near Eastern samples . </P>

Who were the etruscans and where did they come from