Political organization and magistrates

In the last few decades of the eighth century BCE and even more so in the first few decades of the seventh, the role of the Etruscan elites grew further, part of an overall process of social restructuring along aristocratic lines linked to the urbanization already in progress. Archaeologically, the clear allusions to the regal status of the most eminent members of the Etruscan elites of the Orientalizing period are consistent with the information provided by the literary sources, which also describe Etruria's most ancient historical phase as monarchical. The reconstruction of Etruscan political structures and organization in the seventh to sixth centuries BCE should, in the first instance, be conducted with reference to the individual local contexts: Etruscan cities were autonomous political entities whose authority extended to the surrounding area (city-states). In the current historical interpretation, the period from the last decades of the sixth to the first decades of the fifth represent a long phase of transition, by the end of which the Etruscan cities (or at least most of them) had abandoned monarchical regimes in favor of some form of republican order. The archaeological evidence (above all, the Etruscan inscriptions of the fourth to the second centuries BCE) enable enables us to reconstruct some aspects of the magisterial system in force in the Etruscan settlements of the time. Etruscan literary and epigraphical sources also make mention of the existence of a (con)federal-organism encompassing the twelve populi of Etruria.