Preserved by Accident, an Ocean Away

The Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis, the longest surviving Etruscan text and evidently a ritual calendar specifying religious offerings, survived only because it was cut into strips and reused as wrapping for an Egyptian mummy, meaning the single most important surviving document of Etruscan religious language exists today in Croatia, where the mummy was later brought, having traveled from Italy to Ptolemaic Egypt and then much later to Europe again, a preservation history entirely accidental and completely disconnected from any deliberate effort to preserve Etruscan religious knowledge for future readers. This kind of accidental survival, rather than deliberate preservation through continuous religious or scholarly transmission, characterizes much of what remains of Etruscan civilization generally, since Etruscan culture was substantially absorbed into Roman civilization by the early centuries of the common era, with Etruscan religious specialists and their specialized ritual knowledge, including the discipline of haruspicy, animal entrail divination for which Etruscan priests were particularly renowned even among the Romans who absorbed much of their culture, surviving mainly through Roman authors' own accounts of a tradition already becoming historical to them.