Ancient wisdom needed ancient witnesses, and missing witnesses created an opportunity. Annius of Viterbo (c. 1432–1502), a Dominican friar, became expert at supplying them. His interests began close to home, where the remains of Etruscan antiquity offered his town a past older than Rome. The objects were real, but deciding what they proved left considerable room for an enterprising interpreter.
In 1493, hunters accompanying the pope near Viterbo followed a rabbit into an opening that led to an Etruscan tomb. The discovery brought carved and inscribed sarcophagi into public view. Within a month Annius had produced an explanation connecting the find with the goddess Isis and the illustrious early history of the place. He gave antiquities that nobody present could securely read a story suited to the people inspecting them.
His publication of supposed ancient histories in 1498 made the undertaking much larger. Among its authorities was a work attributed to Berosus, a Babylonian historian known through genuine references in other ancient books. Annius’s version connected the descendants of Noah to later peoples and kingdoms. European towns and ruling families gained ancestors close to the Flood, supported by an author who appeared older than the Greek histories on which they had previously depended.
Much of this evidence was Annius’s own fabrication. His commentary, purported discoveries, and invented authors confirmed one another, so that a reader checking one claim might be directed to another part of the same construction. The collection succeeded partly because it answered real historical questions. How had the biblical family become the nations of later history, and where did a particular city belong within that descent?
Scholars challenged the texts, but rejection did not remove everything already derived from them. A later writer might abandon Annius’s name while retaining an ancestor learned through an intermediary. Local histories and dynastic claims also gave readers reasons to keep what he had supplied. The forged authors thus continued to appear in books whose writers disagreed about their authenticity, with Noah’s descendants still providing a place for Europe’s peoples in the first ages of the world.