I wonder if you are drawing conclusions about Etruscan culture from what is reported in Greek and Roman historical sources, or only by early scholarship? There isn’t much written about them by ancient historians, and earlier views on the culture are widely considered outdated- but modern archaeology has devoted quite a lot of attention to the Etruscans! I highly recommend Graeme Barker and Tom Rasmussen’s text, ‘The Etruscans’ (2000) as a place to start, as they endeavor to tell the story of the culture from an Etruscan perspective, and not a Greek or Roman one. There are undoubtedly more modern texts (including Robert Leighton’s Tarquinia), but the Barker and Rasmussen was our central text for the Etruscan archaeology courses I took in graduate school. I’ve long since had to part with most of my books from those days, but I still have the B & R, and can dig it out tonight to give you a hand.

The Etruscans have enjoyed quite active interest by archaeologists for over a century now. Much of what we know falls under prehistoric material, as Etruscan written sources and inscriptions are rare, sparse, and don’t address details of Etruscan society directly, so there is less to be gleaned, for our purposes, from these. Barker and Rasmussen (2000) note that much of what is written in the Etruscan language denotes instructions for ritual or simple facts from inscriptions, and they conclude that it is “impossible, then, to write a text-based history” (5). But there is quite a lot to be gleaned in details from artwork of the period, which the B & R volume discusses. There are also allusions to Etruscan histories and possibly plays and tragedies in writings by Varro and perhaps also contemporaneous city or villa chronicles (112). While these have not survived, they may have been imitated by Claudius when he spoke about Etruscan history before the Roman Senate (112). He was, apparently, also married to an Etruscan woman, so I wonder if he had a bit of inside knowledge here.

Leaving historical sources aside, there is a wealth of archaeological information about the culture, from the earliest agricultural communities in the region c. 5000 BC to Romanization from the conquest of Veii in 396 BC. Etruscan culture didn’t begin at 700 BC, as has been assumed in the past; modern scholarship recognizes that the culture stretches back quite a significant period before this (Barker and Rasmussen 2000, 5). There is already a very good understanding of the extent of Etruscan habitation and types of settlements in different eras, and several major Etruscan sites have been well explored already: Tarquinia, Vulci, Chiusi, Veii, Cerveteri, and others. Attention to the material culture yields rich rewards, too: Etruria, in its heyday, was a powerhouse that checked the hegemony of rising Latin culture to its south.

The culture was certainly not isolated or a curious anomaly; it took broadly from Greek culture and other contemporaries. Early writers suggesting their origins were those of an ‘exotic elite’ are no longer supported. Instead, our impressions of the Etruscans as a vague and mysterious people are unduly colored by later historical sources, and we actually are exposed to quite a lot about them without being conscious of it: Etruscan culture was itself widely assimilated by Rome. So much material culture that one might assume to be Roman includes practices, art, customs and more that are Etruscan in origin, and there were quite a lot of Etruscan customs and practices that continued (albeit refracted through a Latin lens), only we would now likely identify these features as Roman or Mediterranean.

The Etruscan language is a pickle because it is unique, but it is well classified already. It’s not Indo European, and thus is unrelated to Latin, Oscan, and Umbrian- ancient languages spoken in Italy at the time of the first Etruscan writings from 700 BC. It was written in the Greek alphabet, probably from Euboean Greek. The only vaguely similar language to it is a 6th century BC dialect spoken on Lemnos in the northern Aegean, which is itself unique amongst all other languages spoken in Greece during the period (Barker and Rasmussen 2000, 80-81). This has, in the past, been used to support ideas that they arrived from this region- but as the inscriptions on Lemnos are dated nearly one hundred years after the earliest Etruscan inscriptions in Etruria, they might just as well indicate that the Etruscans were themselves doing a bit of colonizing, far to their east (81).

There is the issue that much of Etruscan culture lies underneath Roman remains, as well as centuries of the later built environment, and that quite a lot of its architecture and material culture has been unearthed, re-used, damaged, and repurposed over the centuries. Tuscany has, after all, been an attractive place to live for quite some time, and archaeological remains have not always been respected by the centuries of cultures that came after them. The Etruscans are known for their burial tumuli largely because it is those structures that were and still are visible in the landscape, and suffered less destruction over the centuries for various reasons, including Latin interest. But even these should be interpreted according to archaeological sources, not historical ones, as most written sources about burial practices were written later, and were “sometimes confused and exaggerated in their reporting” (Barker and Rasmussen 2000, 216).

I hope this helps! This was just a quick search; the text I’m referring to features a wealth of detail on Etruscan symposia, artworks, historical figures (depicted on ceramic vessels, mirrors, and tomb paintings), long-distance trade, and more. And like I said at the beginning of this post, there are Etruscanologists with active research agendas who surely have put out more recent volumes and articles.