fact that the Etruscan tombs were imitations of the homes of
the living. These tombs were constructed upon two types: one rising in
the form of a tumulus or conical mound above the ground when the
situation was a level table-land, and the other consisting of one or
two chambers excavated out of the rock when the tomb was situated on
the precipitous face of a hill. Dr. Isaac Taylor, in his admirable
_Etruscan Researches_, says that the former type recalled the tent,
and the latter the cave, which were the original habitations of men.
The ancestors of the Etruscans are supposed by him to have been a
nomadic race, wandering over the steppes of Asia, and to have dwelt
either in caves or tents. At the present day the yourts or permanent
houses in Siberia and Tartary are modelled on the plan of both kinds
of habitation--the upper part being above the ground, representing the
tent; and the lower part being subterranean, representing the cave.
And so the descendants of this Asiatic horde, having migrated at a
remote period to Italy, preserved the burial traditions of their
remote ancestors, and formed their tombs after the model of the tent
or cave, according as they were constructed on the level plateau or
in the rocky brow of a hill. In further illustration of this theory
he says that in olden times when a member of the Tartar tribe died,
the tent in which he breathed his last, with all its contents intact,
was converted into a tomb by simply covering it with a conical mound
of earth or stones, in order to preserve it from the ravages of wolves
and other beasts of prey. Even the row of stones that surrounded the
outside of the tent and kept down the skins that covered it from being
blown away by the storms of the steppe, was introduced into the
structure of the tomb, and continued to surround the base of the
funeral mound. He finds traces of this circle of stones in the podium
or low wall of masonry which encircled every Etruscan tumulus or
outside tomb, and a remarkable example in the mounds of the Horatii
and Curiatii on the Appian Way at Rome.

This theory, however, it is only fair to state, is disputed by other
writers, who assert that there was no intentional imitation of tents
in Etruscan tombs; for if this had been the design there would have
been a correspondence between the conical outside and the conical
interior, and no Etruscan tomb has been found with a bell-shaped
chamber. The tent-like tumulus, say they, was bu