Cerveteri historical timeline

The oldest evidence on the plateau is funerary, and it places the formation of the settlement at the end of the Bronze Age. In the early Iron Age the population concentrated on the plateau of the Vignali, as numerous smaller settlements in the district were abandoned.

A word about the foundation story. Greek and Latin sources attributed the founding of the city, under the name Agylla, to Pelasgian colonists later driven out by the Tyrrhenians. That is a learned tradition of late Republican and Imperial date, built around etymological explanations of the name, and modern scholarship studies it as the history of a legend rather than as an account of how the settlement actually began.

The city was known by three names at once: Caisra or Cisra to the Etruscans, Agylla to the Greeks, Caere to the Latins.

Between the seventh and fifth centuries BC Caere was one of the most active centres of the Tyrrhenian, through a system of coastal landings of which the chief was Pyrgi, and through a craft industry that reworked Greek and Near Eastern models into forms of its own. It was one of the city-states of the Etruscan League, and around 600 BC its population may have reached 25,000 to 40,000.

Its wealth was founded on metal. The city stood about 7 kilometres inland from the sea, and its prosperity as a trading town derived originally from the iron-ore mines in the Tolfa hills. Three sea ports served it, including Pyrgi — connected to Caere by a road about 13 kilometres long and 10 metres wide — and Punicum. Pyrgi was known for a sanctuary of monumental temples from 510 BC, built by the king of Caere and dedicated to the goddesses Leucothea and Ilithyia.

The necropoleis grew alongside. Tombs at the Banditaccia run from the ninth century BC, in the Villanovan period, through to the later Etruscan period in the third century; the earliest are pits holding the ashes of the dead.

Much of what the tombs contained left Italy long ago. The contents were excavated, often chaotically and illegally, and over the last few centuries have yielded rich and exquisite objects — ceramics and jewellery that today grace museums around the world. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses is the most famous single work to have come out of this ground.

The modern name records the city's decline: Cerveteri is Caere Vetus, old Caere, a thirteenth-century coinage distinguishing the ruined site from Caere Novum, the living town.