Etruscan Orientalization provides a historiography of the terms ‘orientalizing’ and ‘orientalization’ in eighteenth through twentieth century European scholarship on early Etruscan history as it sought to understand how civilizational knowledge transferred in antiquity from East to West. This original orientalist framing of cultural influence was influenced by notions of Italian nationalism and colonialism, all traits that can still be felt in modern understandings of ‘orientalizing’ as an art historical style, chronological period, and process of cultural change. This work argues that scholarship on Mediterranean connectivity in early first millennium BCE can provide new insights by abandoning the term ‘orientalizing’.
