The Etruscan month-name Celi in the Liber Linteus

Eslem zaθrumiś Acale is a direct calendar reference at LL 6.xvii of the Liber Linteus, the infamous "mummy text". We can easily translate it as "on the 18th of Acalva". Likewise at LL 12.x, θunem cialχuś Masn is translated as "on the 29th of Masan". Both month-names are attested in other documents (note the Latin gloss Aclus, equated with June, and the reference to the month of Masan in the Pyrgi Tablets). Both these examples show the same word order mirroring that of Modern French with the date preceding the month-name. The date number is declined in the directive case suffix, -is, referencing an instantaneous point in time.

Now let's look at LL 8.xix, celi huθis zathrumis, which is commonly translated as "on the 26th of (the month of) Celi", as has been done by both Jean Turfa and Larissa Bonfante^[1]. Putting aside the fact that huθ means 'four', not 'six', many Etruscanists depend too much on the Latin gloss Celius, said to be equivalent to September (TLE 824). They've become blindly convinced that if celi should be found next to a number, it must be a month reference even though this month-name is attested nowhere else. Even if this were a month-name, why does it precede the date, in contradiction to the other confirmed calendrical phrases in the same text?

Regardless of whether there was a month-name *Celi in Etruscan, there is a reason to reject the view that celi in the Liber Linteus meant anything other than 'before/upon the earth' with locative case marker -i. That major reason is Occam's Razor and the avoidance of unnecessary assumption. We don't need to evaluate celi as a month-name in any of these instances but we do need to evaluate it as a form of 'earth' in at least the majority of instances in this and in all other artifacts.

In the Liber Linteus itself, this alleged month-name is strangely found a lot beside the word suθ 'tomb' (cf. LL 9.xviii). If we can agree that celi is referring to 'earth' here then celi suθ sensibly means 'before/upon the tomb earth'. The form cel-θi-m 'and in the earth' is already found at LL 6.xviii matching cel-ti in TCort B.iii. This is all in perfect alignment with the noun stem present in cels in TLE 368 and 625. It's certain that none of these last examples can sensibly refer to a month *Celi. They strictly point to 'earth' and so there is simply no methodical reason to continue insisting on the opposite value.

So celi suθ is surely 'before/upon the tomb earth', celi pen equals 'on the earth below' in LL 11.ii (pen = 'below' and ce-pen 'here below') and celi huθis zathrumis must instead mean 'upon the earth on the 24th'. The opening phrase is followed by the offering of gifts to Neptune that are to be dedicated on this day. This sounds a lot like the Roman festival of Neptunalia but this event is thought to have been celebrated on July 23rd. The date number is curiously one day off.


NOTES
^[1] Bonfante/Bonfante, The Etruscan language: An introduction (2002), p.183 & Harvey/Schultz, Religion in republican Italy (2006), p.76 (see link).

Pyrgi Tablets and the burial of the sun

One day, I was scouring the internet, assimilating new perspectives into my personal data collective as usual when I came across a comment by Douglas Kilday posted two years ago on the sci.lang forum. I actually appreciate a lot of his interesting comments and theories on Etruscan. He seems like an overall sensible guy, which is rather odd for this subject since most are loons like me. However, no one's perfect and he provided a translation to the Pyrgi Tablets that I think was sufficiently offtrack to distort what was being expressed in the artifact. The Pyrgi Tablets consist of gold sheets inscribed with both Phoenician and Etruscan texts, a kind of bilingual "Rosetta Stone", if you will. They were created to dedicate the erection of a temple to the goddess Uni-Ashtarte by a leader named Thefarie Veliana. Even though the text is referring to the same event in both languages, and even though Phoenician is fully deciphered, everyone still seems to be having oodles of trouble solving the "riddle" of these tablets. Gee, go figure. An alternative hypothesis for our ineptitude could be that riddles make more money than solutions but surely that can't be it, right?

Kilday mistranslated the vowelless Phoenician phrase b-yrḥ zbḥ šmš as "in (b-) the month (yrḥ) of the Feast (zbḥ) of the Sun (šmš)." Way off, I'm afraid. First of all it's vital that we understand that zbḥ is a pan-Semitic word describing religious sacrifice as in Hebrew זֶבַח zebaḥ (note Ehud Ben-Yehuda & David Weinstein, Ben-Yehuda's Pocket English-Hebrew/Hebrew-English Dictionary, p. 234) and Ugaritic dbḥ (see Stanislav Segert, A Basic Grammar of the Ugaritic Language, p.132) .

Sacrifice of the Sun? Yes, dammit, yes. And if you don't believe me, read here because I swear I did not make this up. The Good Shamash is not having a picnic, here. He's not having a fun outing. Etruscan worshippers seem to have commemorated each year the death and rebirth of the sun. Throughout the early world, this was a prevailing religious motif and a symbolism for the strengthening and weakening of the sun's force throughout the year, embodied as an example in the cyclical worship of the Akkado-Sumerian deity Tammuz-Dumuzi. This phrase in question refers to the cycle of the seasons and this understanding is further reinforced a few lines down when it mentions: b-ym qbr ʔlm = "on (b-) the day (ym) of the burial (qbr) of the divinity (ʔlm)". Again, the verb root qbr is well attested in Semitic languages to denote burial (Hebrew qbr "to bury", Ugaritic qbr "to bury"). So why are we still scratching our heads about it? How daft can we be? Sweet goddess, all the information is readily available if only we would check it out for ourselves.

Only by understanding the Phoenician text properly can we understand the Etruscan text. So when we see that we have a "sacrifice of the sun" and a "burial of the divinity (of the sun)", we can then get a hint as to what the month name Masan signifies. For some reason, Larissa Bonfante places a question mark beside this name of the Etruscan month as if she isn't sure that the name is a bona fide name or something else (Reading the Past - Etruscan (1990), p.60). Obviously she hasn't spent the time looking at the inscriptions available to her. The rest of us can be reassured that it is a true month of the Etruscan calendar because of the date θun-em cialχuś Masn "Masan 29th" written in the very last chapter of the Liber Linteus. The name must derive however from a word used for "burial" or "entombment" built on the verb mas since its participle form masu is found twice in the Cippus Perusinus (CPer A.xiv, A.xvii). One phrase reads: Velθina hinθa cape muni-cle-t masu = "Velthina below (hinθa) was entombed (masu) with the sarcophagus (cape) in this plot (muni-cle-t)."