The Rutuli or Rutulians were an ancient people in Italy.
They lived in a territory whose capital was the ancient town of Ardea, located about 35 km southeast of Rome.
 |
Ancient Latium. Enlarge to see the location of Ardea
|
According to modern scholars, they were most probably connected with the Etruscan peoples (some speculate with the Ligurian peoples). The connection with the Etruscans would explain the similarity between the names of the Rutuli's king Turnus and the name of the Tyrrhenian Sea (Turrenòs in Latin).
In Virgil's Aeneid, and also according to Livy, the Rutuli are led by Turnus, a young prince to whom Latinus, king of the Latins, had promised the hand of his daughter Lavinia in marriage. When the Trojans arrived in Italy, Latinus decided to give his daughter to Aeneas instead, because of instructions he had received from the gods to marry his daughter to a foreigner. Turnus was outraged and led his people as well as several other Italian tribes against the Trojans in war. Virgil's text ends when Aeneas defeats Turnus in single combat and therefore confirms his right to marry Lavinia. In some other accounts of the story of Aeneas, Latinus is later killed in a subsequent battle with the Rutuli.
During the 6th century BC, in Rome's early semi-legendary history, Rome's seventh and final king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus went to war with the Rutuli. According to Livy, the Rutuli were, at that time, a very wealthy and powerful people. Tarquinius was desirous of obtaining the booty that would come with victory over the Rutuli. It is unclear as to the eventual outcomes of the siege and the war.
Eventually, the Rutuli were absorbed by the Latins.
The ethnonym Rutuli comes from the adjective rutilus, which (as we have discussed here) means red, reddish, and is probably of Etruscan origin (and this would confirm a connection between the Rutuli and the Etruscans). Unfortunately, we don’t know if, it this case, the colour refers to Rutuli’s hair or to something else (a garment they used to wear, for example, or their bravery in battle). In modern Italian, rutilismo means “red-hairness”.
In the X book of the Aeneid, Virgil mentions the Rutul Camers, one of the strongest enemy of the Trojans.
I quote the lines, and as you will see, Virgil refers to Camers as fulvus:
Protinus Antaeum et Lucam, prima agmina Turni,
persequitur fortemque Numam fulvumque Camertem,
magnanimo Volcente satum, ditissimus agri
qui fuit Ausonidum et tacitis regnavit Amyclis. Book X, lines 561-564
Here’s the translation into English (
John Dryden’s translation):
On Lycas and Antaeus next he ran,
Two chiefs of Turnus, and who led his van.
They fled for fear; with these, he chas'd along
Camers the yellow-lock'd, and Numa strong;
As you can see, fulvus has been translated as yellow-lock’d.
The Italian and French translations too give respectively biondo and blond.
The Spanish translation is the strangest, because it says Camers has a faz bermeja (red face). The German translation uses the adjective roten (red). Keep in mind I didn't check all the Aeneid's translations in the above languages.
Now, let’s have a look at the adjective fulvus.
Here’s my old Latin-Italian dictionary. Fulvus is translated as rossastro, rossiccio (reddish), fulvo (fulvous, tawny), giallo (yellow).
In modern Italian,
fulvo is used almost exclusively with the meaning of red-haired (both for humans and animals).
I also checked a couple of online Latin-English dictionaies:
WordSense: reddish-yellow, tawny, amber-coloured, fulvous.
Latin Dictionary: tawny, reddish yellow; yellow.
In the image below, you can see the colours of the ancient Romans. Fulvus is indeed a sort of reddish-brown, brown-yellow. There's definitely something yellow in it, but it's not its main characteristic.
However, if you search on the internet, you’ll find different shades, like this one.
In any case, these are not colours that we would call yellow. With a modern terminology, we would call them brownish yellow, burnt orange, sienna, tobacco.
Obviously, we have to keep in mind that ancient people named colours differently from us, so that some even argued that, for example, ancient Greeks were blind to all shades of blue. So, maybe, where today we see shades of orange and brown, the ancient saw shades of yellow.
However, Romans used a different adjective to mean blond. In this article, you can read the hair and eyes colours of the early Roman emperors. Blond-haired is either subflavum or flaventium and as you can check in the image above, flavus is a warm yellow-mustard colour. Unfortunately, the description of the only red-haired emperor mentioned in the article (Vitellius) comes from a Greek source, so we don’t know which term the Romans would have used. Anyway, if these writers used flavus, this means it was not the same as fulvus, so maybe fulvus means light red, for example?
In the Aeneid, Virgil also uses fulvus to refer to a lion’s mane and to a stone. In the Book IV, line 262, he talks of a iaspide fulva adorning Aeneas’ sword.
Now, John Dryden’s translation just translates the words as “glittering gems”, maybe because fulvus comes from the verb fulgeo: to flash, to lighten, to glitter, to gleam, to glare, to glisten, to shine.
However, the iaspis is not any jem: it’s the jasper. The jasper can be virtually of any colour, although in the past the green one was the most used.
.jpg) |
Green jasper scarab
|
Today, the most popular is the red jasper, but in can also be yellow, black and white, gray, striped, etc.
 |
Red jasper
|
I checked some other translations: two in Italian have
biondo diasrpo, one German
Gelb (yellow), while one Spanish have
rojo (red) and the other
amarillo (yellow).
So, all considered, it seems to me that most translators have decided that
fulvus is yellow no matter what, in spite of the Romans having at least four more names for yellow. Apparently, they don’t understand that when we modern people think of yellow, we imagine, for example, a lemon, a daisy, sweetcorn… We don’t see what the Romans saw when they thought of
fulvus, that’s why, in my opinion, the translation of
fulvus with yellow is misleading. As far as hair colour is concerned, if translators don’t want to use "red" because they think red hair is so rare that no-one has it, I think "brown" or "light brown" would be a more appropriate choice.
On a final note, I think it's worth mentioning that today a population exists called… Rutul people (also Rutuls or Rutulians). They live in Russia, Dagestan and Azerbaijan. Actually, they call themselves Mykhabyr. The origin of the name Rutul is uncertain. I translate from Wikipedia in Russian:
The ethnonym Rutuls is associated with the name of the village of Rutul, the most populous Rutul village. The origin of this term remains unclear to this day. Such a term is absent from the toponymy and lexicon of the Rutuls and neighbouring peoples, and, according to historian Musaev G. M., is imported. Well-known sources mentioning the word Rutul are Virgil's epic work Aeneid and Namatsian's poem On his return from Rome to Gaul. In Rutul language, the village of Rutul is called Mykhaa, and its inhabitants call themselves Mykhaadabyr. The term Rutul, as one of the names of the village of Mykhaa, has been known since the 15th century. According to one version, the name was given by the Arabs during the conquest of Dagestan. It is found in epigraphic monuments, in official documents as well as in Persian and Turkish charters.
 |
The village of Rutul, Russian Federation
|
.jpg)
