Etruria

Etruria is the region of central Italy north of the Tiber where the Etruscans lived, and what makes its religion distinctive is that the Romans treated it as an applied science rather than as a rival cult. The body of knowledge, which Latin writers called the Etrusca disciplina, covered three main areas: the reading of the entrails and especially the liver of a sacrificed animal, the interpretation of lightning according to which region of the sky it came from and what it struck, and the correct procedure for founding a city, laying out a temple and dividing land.

The underlying assumption was that the sky is divided into regions belonging to particular gods, that the liver of a sacrificial animal maps onto that division, and that a competent reader can therefore work out which god is signalling and about what. A bronze model of a sheep's liver found near Piacenza, marked out in named compartments, is the clearest surviving evidence for the system.

Rome absorbed the discipline rather than suppressing it. Etruscan specialists, the haruspices, were consulted by the Roman state for centuries, particularly after prodigies, and Roman augury and temple orientation carry the same assumptions about a divided sky. The Roman practice of taking auspices before public business belongs to the same family of ideas, and Jerzy Linderski's reconstruction of the augural law shows how technical and how legally binding that procedure had become.

Etruscan religion is read almost entirely at one remove, and the reason is a shortage of Etruscan writing about it. The alphabet is readable, since it is a version of the Greek one, so the sounds of the language are known; the language itself is not related to Latin or Greek or to any other well documented tongue, and the surviving corpus is dominated by short funerary inscriptions giving names and offices. Long texts are very rare.

The longest of them is a linen book that survives because it was cut into strips and used to wrap an Egyptian mummy, acquired in the nineteenth century and now in Zagreb. It is a ritual calendar: dates, gods, and the offerings due to them, running to some twelve hundred readable words. It is not a narrative and it explains nothing, but it is the closest thing there is to an Etruscan liturgical document written by Etruscans.

Everything else comes through Roman and Greek authors, and they are interested in the parts that are useful to them. Cicero writes about divination as a Roman magistrate arguing about whether it works; Livy records prodigies and their expiation because they mattered to the senate; the later antiquarians preserve fragments of the discipline in the course of explaining Roman practice. The gods are visible in Etruscan art, on mirrors and tomb paintings, often labelled, which is why the pantheon is better known than the theology.