Etruscan

The Etruscan gods are known mainly as a system of jurisdictions rather than as a cast of characters, and the reason is that what survives of Etruscan religion is largely its technical apparatus.

Tinia heads the pantheon, with Uni and Menrva alongside him in a triad the Romans took over as Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. But Tinia is not a free sovereign. The tradition as reported by Roman writers holds that he could throw one kind of thunderbolt on his own authority, a second only with the agreement of a council of gods, and a third only with the consent of higher powers still. Kingship here is constitutionally limited, and that is unusual enough to be the pantheon's signature.

The bronze model of a sheep's liver found near Piacenza makes the structure concrete. Its surface is divided into sixteen regions around the edge and further divisions within, each inscribed with a divine name, and it maps the sky onto the organ so that a diviner could read a sign by locating it. This is a pantheon with fixed addresses.

What the Etruscans said about the making of the world is not known. There is no argument between scholars to report, because there is nothing to argue from, and the atlas records that as unknown with an open question rather than filling it with a guess.

Etruscan can be read and largely cannot be understood. The alphabet is Greek-derived and the sounds are recoverable, but the language has no established relatives, and the corpus consists overwhelmingly of short funerary and dedicatory formulae: names, kinship, offices, ages. Vocabulary is recovered slowly, word by word, from context and from bilinguals.

The long texts are few and strange. The longest is written on linen that was cut into strips and used to wrap a mummy in Egypt, now in Zagreb, and it is a ritual calendar. The Capua tile is another calendar. The gold sheets from Pyrgi are important because one of them is in Phoenician and the others in Etruscan, giving a partial bilingual. None of these is a narrative.

For anything resembling doctrine the evidence is Roman. The Romans took Etruscan divination seriously enough to maintain it as a state discipline for centuries, and Latin writers report the etrusca disciplina at some length. They report the part that interested them, the reading of lightning, of livers and of prodigies, and they report it in Latin categories.

The material record is the counterweight and it is spectacular: painted tombs, engraved mirrors with mythological scenes labelled in Etruscan, temple terracottas, votive deposits. Mirrors in particular preserve divine names attached to images, which is how a good deal of what is known about individual Etruscan gods was established.