Tiras

Tiras (Hebrew: תִירָס Ṯīrās) is, according to the Book of Genesis (Genesis 10) and 1 Chronicles, the seventh and youngest son of Japheth in the Hebrew Bible. A brother of biblical Javan (associated with the Greek people), its geographical locale is sometimes associated by scholars with the Teresh or Tursha, one of the groups which made up the Sea Peoples, a naval confederacy which terrorized Egypt and other Mediterranean nations around 1200 BCE. These Sea People are referred to as "Tursha" in an inscription of Ramesses III, and as "Teresh of the Sea" on the Merneptah Stele. The equation of the Teresh/Tursha with the Tyrrhenians, and by extension with the Etruscans, is not accepted by modern scholarship; there is no archaeological or linguistic evidence of any migration of a Tyrrhenians people into central Italy from the Aegean or Anatolia, and genetic studies of Iron Age individuals from Etruria have found no evidence of recent population movement from Anatolia, confirming a local autochthonous origin for the Etruscans. French scholar Dominique Briquel noted that, even if these stories include historical facts suggesting contact, such contact is more plausibly traceable to cultural exchange than to migration. Some theologians associate Tiras with Thrace or the Etruscans. In 1838, the German theologian Johann Christian Friedrich Tuch suggested identifying Tiras with the Etruscans, who, according to Greek and Roman sources such as Herodotus (I, 94), had been living in Lydia as the Tyrsenoi before emigrating to Italy as early as the 8th century BC. This identification is a 19th-century theological speculation unsupported by modern evidence. Herodotus' account of the Etruscans as Lydian migrants has been shown to be a politically motivated legend, likely fabricated at the Lydian court in the early sixth century BC and lacking any claim to historical truth. Archaeogenomic research has confirmed that...