Lenguas Extranjeras 2024 - Final Test - Oral interview
Passage provided by:
María de los Ángeles Trillo, Gimena Otero, Javier Toso
SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_of_Rome
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KEY WORDS: Rome, historians, prehistoric, migrations, culture, evidence
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Founding of Rome
The founding of Rome was a prehistoric event or process later greatly
embellished by Roman historians and poets. Archaeological evidence indicates
that Rome developed from the gradual union of several hilltop villages during the
Final Bronze Age or early Iron Age. Prehistoric habitation of the Italian Peninsula
occurred by 48,000 years ago, with the area of Rome being settled by around
1600 BC. Some evidence on the Capitoline Hill possibly dates as early as c. 1700
BC and the nearby valley that later housed the Roman Forum had a developed
necropolis by at least 1000 BC. The combination of the hilltop settlements into a
single polity by the later 8th century BC was probably influenced by the trend for
city-state formation emerging from ancient Greece.
Roman myth held that their city was founded by Romulus, son of the war
god Mars and the Vestal virgin Rhea Silvia, fallen princess of Alba Longa and
descendant of Aeneas of Troy. Exposed on the Tiber River, Romulus and his twin
Remus were suckled by a she-wolf at the Lupercal before being raised by the
shepherd Faustulus, taking revenge on their usurping great-uncle Amulius, and
restoring Alba Longa to their grandfather Numitor. The brothers then decided to
establish a new town but quarrelled over some details, ending with Remus's
murder and the establishment of Rome on the Palatine Hill.
Most modern historians doubt the existence of a single founder or founding
event for the city, and no material evidence has been found connecting early
Rome to Alba or Troy. Most modern historians also dismiss the putative Aeneid
dynasty at Alba Longa as fiction. The legendary account was still much discussed
and celebrated in Roman times. The Parilia Festival on 21 April was considered
to commemorate the anniversary of the city's founding during the late Republic
and that aspect of the holiday grew in importance under the Empire until it was
fully transformed into the Romaea in AD 121. The year of the supposed founding
was variously computed by ancient historians, but the two dates seeming to be
officially sanctioned were the Varronian chronology's 753 BC (used by Claudius's
Secular Games and Hadrian's Romaea) and the adjacent year of 752 BC (used
by the Fasti and the Secular Games of Antoninus Pius and Philip I). Despite
known errors in Varro's calculations, it is the 753 BC date that continues to form
the basis for most modern calculations of the AUC calendar era.
Cultural context
The conventional division of pre-Roman cultures in Italy deals with cultures which
spoke Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The Italic languages,
which include Latin, are Indo-European and were spoken, according to
inscriptions, in the lower Tiber Valley. It was once thought that Faliscan – spoken
north of Veii on the right bank of the Tiber – was a separate language, but
inscriptions discovered in the 1980s indicate that Latin was spoken more
generally in the area. Etruscan speakers were concentrated in modern Tuscany
with a similar language called Raetic spoken on the upper Adige (the foothills of
the eastern Italian Alps).
When drawing a connection between peoples and their languages, a
reconstruction emerges with Indo-European peoples arriving in various waves of
migrations during the first and second millennia BC: first a western Italic group
(including Latin), followed by a central Italic group of Osco-Umbrian dialects, with
a late arrival of Greek and Celtic on the Italian peninsula, from across the Adriatic
and Alps, respectively. These migrations are generally believed to have displaced
speakers of Etruscan and other pre-Indo-European languages; although it is
possible that Etruscan arrived also by migration, it must have done so before
2000 BC.
The start of the Iron Age saw a gradual increase in social complexity and
population that led to the emergence of proto-urban settlements in central and
northern Italy writ large. These proto-urban agglomerations were normally
clusters of smaller settlements that were insufficiently distant to be separated
communities; over time, they would unify. [...]
Source: WIKIPEDIA. Recuperado de: Founding of Rome - Wikipedia
Capitoline Wolf, sculpture of the she-wolf feeding the twins Romulus and Remus, the most famous
image associated with the founding of Rome. According to Livy, it was erected in 296 BC.
Western Europe during its Middle Bronze Age,
with the Apennine Culture in blue
