Etruscans

The Etruscans were remembered by Roman writers as the most religious of peoples, meaning the most preoccupied with method. What they possessed was a disciplina, a body of technique for establishing divine intention, transmitted in books that Cicero and others describe and that do not survive: books on the reading of entrails, books on lightning, and books on the founding of cities, the division of land and the ordering of time.

Nancy de Grummond and Erika Simon's survey sets out what can be recovered. The bronze model liver found near Piacenza is the key object, its surface divided into regions each inscribed with a god's name, so that the position of a mark on a sacrificial animal's liver could be referred to a specific power. The same logic governed lightning. The sky was divided into sixteen parts, and the part a bolt came from determined which god had sent it and what the sign meant.

The pantheon includes Tin or Tinia, Uni and Menrva, a triad the Romans received as Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, alongside figures with no Roman equivalent such as the fate goddess Vanth and the demon Charun with his hammer, both of whom appear in tomb painting. Roman religion took the haruspices themselves, who were still being consulted by the state centuries after Etruria had been absorbed into it.

Etruscan is written in an alphabet derived from Greek and can be read aloud without difficulty. Understanding it is another matter. The language is not Indo-European and has no close relatives beyond the Lemnian of a single stele and the Raetic of the Alps, so its vocabulary has to be recovered from context, from bilingual objects and from the repeated formulas of funerary inscriptions.

Most of the surviving corpus is short and formulaic, which is why the Liber Linteus matters so much. It is a linen ritual calendar, the longest Etruscan text known, and it survives because it was cut into strips and used to wrap a mummy in Ptolemaic Egypt before reaching Zagreb in the nineteenth century. L. B. van der Meer's commentary works through what can be established of its prescriptions, which are dated instructions for offerings to named gods.

The Etruscan cities were absorbed by Rome across the fourth and third centuries BCE and their language gave way to Latin, with the last inscriptions falling around the turn of the era. The emperor Claudius wrote a history of them in twenty books, now lost, which is one of the more painful absences in the record. What remains is archaeology: painted chamber tombs at Tarquinia, the necropolis at Cerveteri, bronze mirrors engraved with named mythological scenes, and the terracottas from temple roofs.