The Etruscans

On 26 September 1877 a farmer ploughing a field near Gossolengo, south of Piacenza in northern Italy, turned up a flat piece of bronze about the size of a hand. It was a model of a sheep's liver, cast in the second century BCE, its upper surface divided by incised lines into compartments, each inscribed with a name in Etruscan letters: Tin, Uni, Fufluns, Cilens, Tluscv and many more. It was a map of the heavens laid out on an organ. An Etruscan priest, the haruspex, would sacrifice a sheep, lift out its liver, and read the will of the gods from its shape, colour and marks, region by region, each region belonging to a deity. The Liver of Piacenza is the most famous object of a people whom the Romans themselves called "more devoted than any other to religious rites", and whose priests Rome went on consulting for centuries after the Etruscans had lost their independence.

A people between myth and archaeology

The Etruscans lived in central Italy, in the land between the Arno and the Tiber still called Tuscany, from the early Iron Age Villanovan culture of about 900 BCE until they were absorbed by Rome in the last centuries BCE. They were organized in independent city-states, traditionally a league of twelve, among them Tarquinia, Cerveteri (Caere), Veii, Vulci, Chiusi and Volsinii (Orvieto). At their height, in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, they dominated much of Italy, traded across the Mediterranean, and gave Rome some of its early kings.

Where they came from was argued about in antiquity. Herodotus said they had migrated from Lydia in Asia Minor; Dionysius of Halicarnassus said they were native to Italy. A 2021 study of ancient DNA from 82 individuals, led by Cosimo Posth, found that the Etruscans were genetically similar to their Latin neighbours, with no sign of recent migration from Anatolia: an indigenous people, despite their distinctive culture.

Their language is written in an alphabet adapted from Greek, so it can be read aloud, but it is not Indo-European, unrelated to Latin or Greek, and it is still only partly understood: the meaning of many words is known from bilingual texts, glosses and context, but longer texts remain difficult. Its only relatives are the little-known Raetic of the Alps and the language of an inscription from the island of Lemnos.

The discipline

The Romans called Etruscan religious knowledge the Etrusca disciplina, the "Etruscan discipline". It was a body of sacred books, now lost, known from Roman writers such as Cicero, Seneca, Pliny the Elder and Censorinus. Tradition divided it into three kinds:

• the libri haruspicini, on divination from the entrails of sacrificed animals;
• the libri fulgurales, on the interpretation of lightning;
• the libri rituales, on the rites for founding cities and temples, laying out boundaries, dividing time, the afterlife (the libri Acherontici) and prodigies (the libri ostentarii).

The Etruscans said this knowledge had been revealed. Near Tarquinia, a man ploughing a field saw a child with the wisdom of an old man rise out of the furrow: Tages, who sang the rules of divination to the gathered lords of Etruria, who wrote them down, and then died or vanished. A nymph or prophetess, Vegoia, revealed the rules of lightning and of boundaries; a fragment attributed to her, preserved in a Roman land-surveying manual, warns that whoever moves a boundary stone will be punished by the gods. Etruscan religion thus understood itself as a religion of the book, a revealed and written discipline for knowing the gods' intentions.

Liver and lightning

The haruspex (Etruscan netśvis) was the specialist in entrails. Like the Mesopotamian priests who read clay models of livers a thousand years earlier, he read the organ as a microcosm of the sky. The Liver of Piacenza divides its surface into a ring of sixteen outer compartments and a set of inner ones, some forty in all, inscribed with the names of more than twenty deities. The outer ring corresponds to the sixteen regions into which, Pliny tells us, the Etruscans divided the sky. Gods of favourable powers lived in the east, those of ill omen in the west; the northwest was the most feared.

The same sixteen regions governed the reading of lightning. Where a bolt came from, where it struck, its colour and effect all revealed which god had thrown it and what it meant. Tinia, the chief god, had three kinds of bolts: the first he could throw at will, as a warning; the second only with the advice of twelve counsellor gods; the third, the most terrible, only with the consent of the "hidden" or "veiled" gods. Places struck by lightning were sacred and were buried and walled off.

A templum, originally, was not a building but a sacred space marked out on the ground or in the sky for observation: the same geometry organized the liver, the sky, the temple, and the grid of a newly founded city.

Gods and goddesses

Etruscan inscriptions, mirrors, vases and the Piacenza liver name many gods. The most important include:

• Tinia (Tin), the sky god and wielder of lightning, equated with Zeus and Jupiter;
• Uni, the great goddess, equated with Hera and Juno, and with the Phoenician Astarte;
• Menrva, goddess of wisdom and war, equated with Athena and Minerva;
• Fufluns, god of wine and growth, equated with Dionysus;
• Turan, goddess of love (Aphrodite); Turms, messenger (Hermes); Sethlans, smith (Hephaestus); Aplu (Apollo); Hercle (Heracles), who was especially popular;
• Voltumna (Veltha), the god of the federal sanctuary of the twelve cities;
• figures of the underworld: Aita and Phersipnai (Hades and Persephone), and the death demons below.

The grouping of Tinia, Uni and Menrva is often seen as the model of Rome's Capitoline Triad, Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, whose temple on the Capitol was built, tradition says, by Etruscan kings of Rome with an Etruscan sculptor. The identification of many Etruscan gods with Greek ones came early and was deep; how much of the pantheon was native and how much borrowed is debated.

Temples, sanctuaries and gold

Etruscan temples stood on high podiums with deep porches and a front staircase, built of mud brick and wood, roofed with brightly painted terracotta sculptures; the famous terracotta Apollo of Veii, from a temple roof of about 510 BCE, shows the style. At Pyrgi, the port of Cerveteri, excavations in 1964 found three sheets of gold, rolled up and buried, inscribed around 500 BCE: two in Etruscan and one in Phoenician. They record the dedication of a sanctuary by Thefarie Velianas, ruler of Cerveteri, to the goddess called Uni in Etruscan and Astarte in Phoenician. The Pyrgi tablets are the nearest thing to an Etruscan–Phoenician Rosetta Stone, and show a Mediterranean in which gods were translated across languages.

The twelve cities met each year at the Fanum Voltumnae, the sanctuary of Voltumna, for festivals, games and councils. Its location was lost; excavations since 2000 at Campo della Fiera, below Orvieto, led by Simonetta Stopponi, have uncovered a great sanctuary complex that many scholars now identify with it, an identification that is widely accepted but not certain.

The linen book

The longest surviving Etruscan text survived by an extraordinary route. In the nineteenth century a Croatian traveller brought back from Egypt a woman's mummy, now in the Archaeological Museum of Zagreb. Its wrappings were strips of a linen book, written in Etruscan (dated to the third century BCE by R. A. Housley, D. Srdoč and N. Horvatinčić's 1989 radiocarbon study of the linen, which gave a most probable range of about 360–210 BCE, and by L. B. van der Meer's 2007 study to the first half of the second), torn up and reused by embalmers in Egypt. The Liber Linteus, "Linen Book", with about 1,200 legible words, is the only surviving linen book of antiquity. From the words that can be understood, dates, gods' names and ritual terms such as offerings and libations, it appears to be a ritual calendar, prescribing rites to particular gods on particular days. Its detail remains beyond full translation.

The house of the dead

What most people see of the Etruscans are their tombs. At Cerveteri the Banditaccia necropolis is a city of the dead, with great mounds and streets of tombs carved from the rock as houses, with beds, chairs, shields and household tools in stone. At Tarquinia the Monterozzi necropolis holds some 200 painted tombs. Together these cemeteries are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The paintings change over time. The earlier tombs, of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, show banquets, music, dancing, athletic games, hunting and fishing: the dead feasting as they had in life, or the funeral games held in their honour. The famous terracotta Sarcophagus of the Spouses from Cerveteri (late sixth century BCE) shows a husband and wife reclining together at a banquet, smiling. From the fourth century the mood darkens. The Tomb of Orcus shows the underworld with Hades and Persephone and a monstrous demon, and death demons appear everywhere: Charun, blue-skinned, hook-nosed, with a great hammer, guarding the doors; and Vanth, a winged female spirit with a torch or scroll, who escorts the dead. Scholars link the change to the Etruscans' military defeats and loss of power to Rome, and to Greek influence; the connection is plausible and debated.

Etruscan time and the end of a people

The Etruscans believed that peoples, like people, had a fixed span. Censorinus, a Roman writer of the third century CE, reports that they held that their nation had been given ten saecula, "ages", each lasting as long as the longest life of anyone born at its beginning, so that ages varied in length, their ends marked by portents. Writers of the first century BCE reported that the eighth or ninth age was ending; the comet after Julius Caesar's death in 44 BCE was read by a haruspex as the end of the ninth age and the beginning of the tenth. The prophecy was, in a sense, fulfilled: within a few generations Etruscan language and identity faded into Roman Italy.

The discipline outlived its people. Rome consulted haruspices throughout its history. Suetonius tells how the haruspex Spurinna warned Julius Caesar to beware of a danger that would come no later than the Ides of March. The emperor Claudius, himself a historian of the Etruscans, reorganized an order of sixty haruspices. As late as 408 CE, according to the historian Zosimus, Etruscan diviners offered to save Rome from the Goths by calling down lightning.

The believer's lens

No one practises Etruscan religion today, except in small modern revivals. For the Etruscans themselves, the evidence suggests, the world was full of signs: the gods spoke through lightning, the flight of birds, the entrails of sacrificed animals and strange events, and a careful, trained reading could know their will and avert their anger. Their religion was one of revelation and exactness: Tages and Vegoia had given the rules, and the rules had to be followed. Death was a journey into the underworld, escorted by demons, towards a banquet or a judgment; the family feasted with its dead and honoured them in tombs built like houses.

The skeptical lens

The historian's first point is that nearly all we know of the Etrusca disciplina comes from Roman and Greek writers, often centuries later, who admired and sometimes exoticized Etruscan piety. The sacred books are lost. The Etruscans' own texts, the liver, the Pyrgi tablets, the Liber Linteus and thousands of short inscriptions, can be read only partly.

The second is that divination does not work as prediction. Its success in stories such as Spurinna's warning is recorded after the fact, and failed predictions are rarely reported. What divination did was social: it gave authority to decisions, made the anger of the gods manageable, and gave its specialists power.

The third concerns origins. Herodotus's migration story has been disproved by ancient DNA; the Etruscans' distinctiveness was cultural and linguistic, not a sign of foreign descent. Claims that the Etruscan language has been fully deciphered through Hungarian, Albanian, Turkish or other modern languages appear often and are rejected by specialists.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• The liver as cosmos. The Liver of Piacenza is a map in which an animal's organ, the sky and the pantheon share one geometry of sixteen regions. Reading it was reading the universe in miniature. The practice parallels Mesopotamian clay liver models (ch03), and a direct historical link through the Near East is possible but unproven.
• The sixteenfold sky. The division of the heavens into sixteen regions, favourable east and ominous west, organized both lightning lore and the liver, and made direction itself meaningful.
• The templum and the city. The same sacred geometry was applied to the ground: cities were founded with a ritual furrow ploughed around their boundary (a rite the Romans said they learned from the Etruscans), and laid out on crossing axes. Space was made sacred by measuring it.
• The boundary stone. The prophecy of Vegoia made land boundaries sacred and their violation a sin punished by storms and disease: property protected by religious law.
• The lituus. The curved staff of the augur, carried by Etruscan priests in art, was used to mark out the regions of the sky; the Romans inherited it, and the crosier of Christian bishops has sometimes been traced to it (a popular derivation, not established).
• Phersu and the mask. A masked figure labelled phersu appears in the Tomb of the Augurs at Tarquinia in a cruel funeral game. Some scholars derive the Latin persona, "mask", and hence English "person", from this Etruscan word; the etymology is plausible and disputed.
• Gold and translation. The Pyrgi tablets inscribe the same dedication in two languages and two scripts: a sacred text that encodes the identification of Uni with Astarte.
• The banquet couple. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses, with husband and wife reclining together, encodes a vision of marriage and the afterlife unusual in the ancient Mediterranean, where Greek women did not recline at banquets.

Connections

The Etruscans were neighbours, teachers and victims of Rome (ch13), which took from them its triad of Capitoline gods, its haruspices, its lituus, and perhaps the gladiatorial games. They traded and competed with the Greeks (ch08, ch15), whose myths they adopted and transformed on their mirrors and vases, and with the Phoenicians and Carthaginians (ch58), as the Pyrgi tablets show. Their divination continues the Mesopotamian science of omens (ch03) and has parallels in the Chinese oracle bones (ch09). Their underworld demons and journeys of the dead belong in Journeys to the Underworld (ch47), their ages of the world in The End of Days (ch50), and their sacrifices in Sacrifice & the Scapegoat (ch51).

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch77.html · a comparative library of the sacred.