Tyrrhenians (Attic Greek: Tyrrhēnoi) or Tyrsenians (Ionic: Tursēnoi; Doric: Tyrsānoi Dionysius of Halicarnassus stated that the Greeks once called Latins, Umbrians, Ausonians, and others "Tyrrhenians," and that Rome was called a Tyrrhenian city.
Furthermore the languages of Etruscan, Rhaetian and Lemnian cultures have been grouped together as the Tyrsenian languages, based on their strong similarities.
thumb|300px|Tyrrhenian languages
Earliest references
The names are believed to be exonyms, only known to have been used by authors of Ancient Greek, though their origin is uncertain and apparently not Greek. They have been connected to τύρσις (túrsis), also a "Mediterranean" loan into Greek, meaning "tower". Direct connections with Tuscī, the Latin exonym for the Etruscans, from *Turs-ci, have also been attempted.
The first Greek author to mention the Tyrrhenians is the 8th-century BC Greek poet Hesiod, in his work, the Theogony. He merely described them as residing in central Italy alongside the Latins.
The Homeric hymn to Dionysus has Tyrsenian pirates seizing Dionysus:
After Herodotus' Histories a party of Lydians, wretched by a persistent famine, decided to migrate. Led by Tyrsenos, son of Atys, king of Lydia, they sailed to the west coast of central Italy where they settled in the region of the Umbri.
Late references
The Tyrrhenians are referred to as pirates by Ephorus of Cyme as reported by Strabo. The pirating actions of the Tyrrhenians would not have allowed the Greeks to found their colonies in Sicily before the 8th century BC.
In the 6th and 5th centuries BC, the name referred specifically to the Etruscans for whom the Tyrrhenian Sea is named, according to Strabo. <!-- This needs a citation to be displayed: -- there is a Greek-Etruscan bilingual inscription at Delphi from this period in which the Etruscan tribal name Velthanes is rendered as Tyrrhenoi in Greek. --> In Pindar, the Tyrsenoi appear allied with the Carthaginians as a threat to Magna Graecia:
The name is also attested in a fragment by Sophocles.
The name becomes increasingly associated with the generic Pelasgians. Herodotus places them in Crestonia in Thrace, as neighbours of the Pelasgians. Similarly, Thucydides mentions them together with the Pelasgians and associates them with Lemnian pirates and with the pre-Greek population of Attica.
Lemnos remained relatively free of Greek influence until Hellenistic times, and the Lemnos stele of the 6th century BC was inscribed with a language very similar to Etruscan, which has led to the postulation of a Tyrrhenian language family of Etruscan, Lemnian and Raetic.
There is therefore evidence demonstrating the existence of a linguistic relationship between the so-called Lemnian language and Etruscan. The circumstances regarding this phenomenon are still debated today; most scholars attribute the presence in Lemnos of a language related to Etruscan, attested in Italy, to a movement eastward of Etruscan groups from Italy around the eighth century, placing the homeland of the Etruscans in Italy and the Alps, particularly because of their relation to the Alpine Rhaetian population. Another hypothesis connecting the Tyrrhenians and the Etruscans posits that the Etruscans derive at least partially from a 12th century BC invasion from the Aegean and Anatolia imposing itself over the Villanovan culture, with some scholars claiming a relationship or at least evidence of close contact between the Anatolian languages and the Etruscan language and adherents of the latter school of thought point to the legend of Lydian origin of the Etruscans referred to by Herodotus and Livy's statement that the Rhaetians were Etruscans driven into the mountains by the invading Gauls. Critics of the theory point to the lack of concrete evidence of a linguistic relationship of Etruscan with Anatolian, and to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who decidedly argues against an Etruscan-Lydian relationship. Furthermore, there is no archaeological evidence from material culture of such a cultural shift and of an eastern origins of the Etruscans, in modern times, all the evidence gathered so far by etruscologists and archaeologists specializing in prehistory and protohistory points to an autochthonous origin of the Etruscans. Just as the archaeological evidence is against the idea that the Rhaetians are descended from the Etruscans who fled from Po Valley because of the Gallic invasions, as the Rhaetians are archaeologically attested in their Alpine sites long before. Recent archaeogenetic studies have also concluded that the Etruscans were autochthonous, and that the lack of recent Anatolian-related admixture and Iranian-related ancestry among the Etruscans, who firmly cluster with Iron Age European populations, might suggest that the presence of a handful of inscriptions found on Lemnos, written in a language related to Etruscan and Raetic, could represent population movements departing from the Italian peninsula.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus states that "there was a time when the Latins, the Umbrians, the Ausonians and many others were all called Tyrrhenians by the Greeks, the remoteness of the countries inhabited by these nations making their exact distinctions obscure to those who lived at a distance."
Conjectured identification with the Teresh (Sea Peoples)
The identification of the Tyrsenians with the Teresh (Egyptian: trš.w), a group attested in Egyptian records of the late second millennium BC, remains a longstanding hypothesis without scholarly consensus or direct archaeological evidence. Academic scholarship has increasingly undermined the broader assumptions on which this equation rests, including genetic studies of Etruscan populations that found no evidence of a recent migration from Anatolia or the Aegean into central Italy.