In the 1540s, Piefrancesco Giambullari and Giovan Battista Gelli published books in which they argued that the Florentine language was not a debased form of Latin, but derived from Aramaic and Etruscan. Their claims divided the Accademia Fiorentina for a number of years, and earned them the nickname “Aramei.”They relied especially on the writings of Annius of Viterbo, whose fraudulent works seemed to them to provide information about the region and its people that was absent from Roman sources. Their arguments about language history were unsatisfactory to many; efforts to refute them effectivelyinspired years of further research. Yet even those who opposed them were interested in finding ways to study peoples, languages, and customs. Ancient models of historical writing focused on politics and public actions, but in order to study groups of people, customs, or languages, newer approaches were needed.