Piacenza Liver and The Palace Gate

Now that we've survived another holiday season intact (more or less), I have a strange yearning to talk about the inner portions of the Etruscan Piacenza Liver artefact again. It seems to me that the first place to start in cracking the mystery is to compare the Etruscan liver model with Babylonian haruspical traditions yet oddly Etruscanist authors continue to fail to do that. So let's break away from academic status quo and see what we can't find, shall we?

One link online concerning Babylonian haruspicy (i.e. the practice of divining the future through sheep livers) may oddly enough help us shed some light on Etruscan rites, beliefs and cosmology: Sacrificial divination: Confirmation of extispicy. It shows a map of the sheep's liver and explains the significance to Babylonian ritual. There is also a very informative book called Babylonian Liver Omens where on page 45 a graphic shows the various parts of the liver as they were identified in the Babylonian language. This is followed by a lengthy explanation of the religious significance of each section.

Looking back at the Piacenza Liver, the middle section appears to me to have a direct connection to the Bāb Ekalli (aka. "The Palace Gate"). On page 46, it states:

"Symbolic value (OBE, 60): the palace, its internal affairs and the city gate and its incoming and outgoing traffic. In 62 Pān tākalti Tablet 5 many apodoses concern life and intrigue at the palace, only very few refer to the city gate."

This then seems to connect back to the tripartite division of the inner section of the Piacenza Liver that I suggested previously in Solving the inner portions of the Piacenza Liver. This particular section would correspond to the earthly "middle world", pertaining to the world of humankind.

Finding structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap - Part 4

(Continued from Finding structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap - Part 3.)

I know it's been a few days between Part 3 and this latest sequel but I haven't forgetten the next topic that I want to cover. It's a large one. In fact, I feel it's my duty to write about this because it's a topic that everyone else seems to conveniently forget. I want to get serious and start exploring how Etruscan religion relates to Near-Eastern traditions and I'm perturbed that I don't find this topic covered by so-called experts in the field.


Etruscologists still clueless about the big-picture of Mediterranean history

Doing a quick search for “Babylonian haruspicy” in Google Books shows me that academics knew about this curious ancient science to the east involving the gruesome inspection of sheep's livers to divine the future as far back as 1897. We can see Kroeber's published quotes on Babylonians inspecting omens from animal livers in 1923 who claims that it was Babylonians who invented the practice^[1]. To put that in chronological context, Kroeber's words were put to print years before either of my grandfathers even hit puberty yet. It's safe to say then that the knowledge of Near-Eastern haruspicy is a centuries-old fact and that since the Piacenza Liver was discovered in 1877^[2], there was more than a full century for even the most pitiful academic to realize that the entire basis of Etruscan religion was imported into Italy from the Near East. Indeed, it was discovered long ago - the Near-Eastern origin of haruspicy is readily available in general reference books such as Encyclopedia Britannica.

Yet, as of 2006, De Grummond in Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend^[3] (much like Pallottino in The Etruscans (1975) before her) has the gull to waste her readers time attempting unsuccessfully to illucidate Etruscan haruspicy not through our well-established knowledge of the identical practice in Babylon and Western Anatolia, but by devoting several pages to a most obscure allegory created by our poetic friend, Martianus Capella. This, despite it being quite clear that the main focus of his work De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii was to paint an allegory about eloquence and the love of learning, purposely personified by the two subjects of the wedding scene: Mercury and Philology^[4]. It's hardly a trustworthy, first-hand account of Etruscan haruspicy when compared to the Babylonian artifact from Sippar whose picture I've shown in Part 1. I wonder if De Grummond knows how ironic she appears when she effectively bastardizes Capella's emphasis on learning and uses it for its exact opposite, ignorance and obscurity. This 'mystery-mongering' is no different from the food industry that markets 'flavour' at the expense of nutritive substance. Whatever the shallow reason behind it, the continued avoidance of Near-Eastern religion to better explain the Piacenza Liver combined with emphases on the most obscure references around is fishy.

Even though Capella was most probably influenced by Etruscan mythology because of his references to a 16-part sky and deities “living” in these sectioned celestial spaces, we can hardly be certain what parts of his account were based on Etruscan religious tradition and what originated purely from his own imagination. While some Etruscologists persist on making Catha (as found on the Piacenza Liver) equivalent to Capella's Solis Filia 'daughter of the Sun', we should take this idle theorizing with a grain of salt. There's no proof that Capella's account must correlate 100% with what we find on the Piacenza Liver at all. Why should it? I hardly think that Capella's purpose behind De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii was to make an accurate historical account of Etruscan religion so why should we read it without reserved skepticism?


The key to Etruscan haruspicy is in Western Anatolian religion

Let's cut to the chase. The extraction of livers specifically from sheep to divine the future is so bizarre and yet so specific that it's clear that the practice that many would describe as so typically Etruscan can only be an import from the Near East. Yet if we accept that such important things like the Etruscan alphabet and haruspicy are both exogenous, what then is left which can be said to be autochthonous to Italy and which is still identifiably Etruscan? To be even more blunt: If the entire haruspical tradition is from the Near East and related closely with Babylonian or Hittite religion which share the same practices, then why aren't Etruscologists doing the sensible thing and putting away their childish toys (namely Capella's fictitious poetry) and picking up a book on Babylonian or Hittite divination practices in order to understand Etruscan religion more competently?

Adding two and two isn't hard here: Etruscan religion is effectively Western Anatolian religion because Etruscan ancestry lied largely in the former lands of Arzawa. So how then do the practices of Etruscan tradition relate to Babylonian practices? How do the gods of Etruria and the structure of the Etruscan pantheon relate to Babylonian and Hittite views?


NOTES
[1] Kroeber, Anthropology (1923), p.209 (see link).
[2] Haarmaan, Early Civilization and Literacy in Europe: An Inquiry Into Cultural Continuity in the Mediterranean World (1996), p.162 (see link).
[3] De Grummond, Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend (2006), p.49 (see link).
[4] McKeon/McKeon/Swenson, Selected Writings of Richard McKeon (1998), p.220 (see link).

Finding structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap - Part 3

(Continued from Finding structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap - Part 2.)

Now, you may wonder what difference it makes that the 16 sections on the border can be cleverly reduced to 14 so that there are seven deities on either side. Some of you may have read much on these 16 regions of the sky and presumed that this was just a twin-doubling of the quadridirectional sky. So if you start with the almost-universal "4-direction model" of the cosmos, ancient philosophers might have decided to double that scheme to eight directions at some point. And then by doubling it again, we get the 16 directions that the Etruscans worshipped. Why then should we be entertaining my crazy insight above if it contradicts this one? The great thing about religious artifacts is that their symbolism is normally rich with layers and history. There would be no contradiction in believing that both ideas are correct at once, that 16 divisions are merely a quadrupling of an earlier 4-direction cosmos and that the 16 deities placed on the rim of the liver model were once 14 in number. You see, while the 16-direction cosmos simply originates from a general floorplan of the cosmos, the 14 original gods I suggest may stem from mythological tales instead. At some point, we might presume that these 14 gods were made to "fit" a 16-direction cosmos by tripling Tinia, the head god of the pantheon. Tripling him had the benefit of not only linking the divided skies with the existing pantheon, but it also cleverly made it clear the immense importance he was given over all other gods, as their leader.


The connection between the outer and inner 'houses' has its limits

I wish I didn't have to say something so obvious, but the rim which lists 16 gods is largely seperate from the inner regions of the Piacenza liver model. The outer regions really only pertain to the sky and this logically means that they pertain not to haruspicy itself but rather to other known forms of divination in Etruria, namely auspicy (i.e. the interpretation of the movement of birds for omens) and brontoscopy (i.e. the interpretation of lightning as omen). It is the inner regions that directly impact on haruspicy and probably have little bearing to the other forms of divination. Since the model cleverly combines all of these divination practices together into a cosmological model, Etruscologists are left to try to piece together how it all interrelates and how it's all different. In my view so far, the purpose of this model by its creator ended at combining these divinatory practices together into a single model as a brief artistic statement of how these practices are connected by way of uncovering the future, but we're no doubt asking too much of the model to provide us with signs of their interrelationships on top of this.

When Nancy De Grummond writes "There are an additional 24 houses (nos. 17-40) on the interior of the Liver and it is not certain exactly how these relate to the 16 regions."^[1], it would appear that she's too mentally removed from the fundamental purpose and meaning of this artifact just as an autistic person is detached from the full meaning of his or her surroundings. Maybe that was a politically incorrect analogy for some of you but it gets my point across quickly.^[2]

To sum up then, we can just say that the outer regions are for auspicy and brontoscopy while the inner regions are for haruspicy. Simple? Good.

Usil and Tivr inscribed underneath are not part of the model!!!

There is a common assumption by current scholars that usils and tivr, two lonely words inscribed beneath the model, are to be counted along with the other regions on the top side of the model.^[3] Upon my own reflections on this artifact, I can now assert confidently that this is false. For one thing, if this were true, we'd expect that both words would be marked in the genitive, but only one is (usil-s) while the other is in the unmarked nominative case (tivr). This assumption is even more empty because it's only based on an older erroneous assumption that the word usil must mean "sun". To add to the dubiousness of that claim, the word came to first be connected with "sun" words in Indo-European like Sabine ausel (< PIE *séh₂wl̥) before it was realized that Etruscan just isn't an Indo-European language. Sadly, this lie is still propogated in modern books. The only "proof" offered in favour of this hypothesis are a couple of mirrors that show a man named Usil with an aura on his head (see pic), but of course an aura doesn't conclusively prove that this character is automatically a sun god (as opposed to, say, a god of sunset, god of light, god of a particular star, etc., etc., etc.). If this is all university academics can come up with, we need to start failing more students.

The fact is that the word cannot sensibly have that value in the Liber Linteus texts where we find the word and its derivatives in reasonable abundance. I feel safe in the value I've now given usil as "setting (of the sun, moon or stars)"^[4]. If you pay attention to the results of my dictionary pdf, you may in fact have already figured out what the phrase tivr usils refers to. However for now, keep in mind that the line on the underside merely signifies an east-west line (the decumanus) that is meant to divide the top side of the artifact into two distinct halves of north and south. And to add historical intrigue, let's just musingly say that if you knew what that phrase meant, as I do now, you would see why it turns Etruscan haruspicy "upside-down", so to speak. Hehe. I'll explain more on this funny story later perhaps.

(Continue reading Finding structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap - Part 4.)


NOTES
[1] De Grummond, Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend (2006), p.49 (see link).
[2] A silly question on the side: Is there a connection between the isolationist, narrow-focus "ivory tower" mindset of university academics and the behavioural characteristics observed in autism spectrum disorders? I smell a thesis!
[3] Bonfante, Etruscan Life and Afterlife: A Handbook of Etruscan Studies (1986), p.224 (see link). See also De Grummond's commentary and drawing of the underside of the artifact in De Grummond, Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend, (2006), p.44 (see link).
[4] I already wrote my in-depth reasons as to why equating usil with "sun" is impossible in my March 2007 entry entitled Etruscan 'usil': It ain't the "sun".

Finding structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap - Part 2

(Continued from Finding structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap - Part 1.)

I want to get beyond the same old explanation of the Piacenza Liver that I consider woefully insufficient in this day and age. To me, republishing information that is both several decades old and that continues to be filled with unanswered questions for so long is inexcusably shameful. I naturally start thinking that authors who do this are more concerned with social acceptance, fame and money than with rational honesty in the topic they represent. I'm sick and tired of reading a nauseatingly identical account of the Etruscan religion no matter what book I read. It seems this is the prevailing trend and the anti-scientific, self-defeatist excuse is always the same: "Etruscans are a mystery. We may never know". Speaking idealistically at least, scholars who are true scholars are captivated by their own study. They have a passion for it. Their love of learning compels them to find better answers and to search out new discoveries, not to play a game of Academic Telephone and effectively plagiarize the works of one's antecedents without even a shred of enlightened commentary to add. Perhaps it's believed that the average layman won't notice that few new ideas have really been published on Etruscan civilization since at least the 1970s. Few really care about Etruscans, the people. The only thing that makes headlines is their "mystery"; the popular media dehumanizes our ancestors all the time like this and in the process dehumanizes us.

So these rants are for those few that are genuinely bored with the "same ol' explanation" and want to finally connect the dots about what Etruscan cosmology is really all about. Let's talk first about some important and fascinating patterns that we may readily see in the Piacenza Liver artifact but which don't make their way into print for reasons that are beyond me.

The unspoken asymmetry

Goddess know's why, but for some reason, academics have failed to clue in that their nicely drawn diagrams that purportedly show a sky divided into sixteen equal parts, additionally cross-correlated with Martianus Capella's strange poetry about the cosmos, are not reflecting the material reality of the artifact that it was originally meant to explain. A picture is worth a thousand words, so let me draw you my own diagram of the issue that I'm talking about:


Evidently there is a snag in the status quo model but mum's the word about this blatant asymmetry in any literature on the topic. (The Academic Game of Telephone, as I said earlier. No one wants to be the nail that gets hammered down afterall.) The reason why the usual model can't explain it is because they keep ignoring, sometimes purposely due to nationalistic rhetoric, the fact that haruspicy was brought to Italy from Western Anatolia (modernday Turkey but known in ancient times as Arzawa) and that its traditions are steeped in Babylonian worldview as I made crystal clear using poignant photos in Part 1. Rather than acknowledge this simple fact, you may notice that De Grummond, Jannot, Pallottino, Bonfante and most other Etruscologists try far too hard to drag in Roman and Greek materials no matter how irrelevant to distract us from the importance that Ancient Near East religions play in breaking the largely artificial mystery of Etruscan religion.

It's rather interesting to me in a mathematical sense that once we count the sections labeled Tin Cilen, Tin Thuf and Tins Thne (situated in the "north" of the model) as merely three aspects of a single deity, one of these naughty asymmetries disappears and we end up with seven deities equally distributed on both sides of the east-west axis. Of course, the assymetry of the cardo line may require a more involved explanation that historians narrowly educated in only Greco-Roman history are probably not qualified to provide us.

(Continue reading Finding structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap - Part 3.)

Finding structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap - Part 1

I have an inkling to revisit the Etruscan Piacenza Liver artifact after reading some painful passages from a recently published book by Nancy De Grummond. I think I have a few new insights now and I need to speak out.



Reading De Grummond is like fingers to a chalkboard for me

"A good bit is known about the Etruscan concept of the structure of heaven and the location of the gods in the universe," or so exaggerates Nancy De Grummond in Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend^[1]. The cold truth however is quite different and soon after she undermines her authority on the subject, as have others before her who are similarly over-boastful: "Roman writers tell us the names of six of the gods who might throw lightning, using Latin designations: [...] We do not know who the other three were." I guess we don't know "a good bit" afterall unless "a good bit" is meant to signify "a subatomic crumb". These nine gods, the novensiles by all accounts (Roman accounts, at least) are part of the basic structure of the Etruscan worldview. So if we don't know their names or what their functions were, what in Hades' name do any of us know about Etruscan beliefs? Keep in mind that De Grummond is the same academic who claims that the gender of Etruscan deities are often "ambiguous"^[2], implying that she feels she can simply conceive of Etruscan deities however it suits her arguments. As such, she has convinced me that she has an anarchistic streak that has contempt for finding structure in ancient religion. But then again, so do all the other Etruscologists since how else can we explain how it's possible for so many experts to spin in the mud for decades without producing any real breakthrough in our understanding of Etruscan language and culture? I remain a hardened skeptic for a reason.

Going beyond academic claptrap

So in order to get passed this new-agey, anti-structure nonsense, we need to do some damage control. First off, it's naive to rely solely on Martianus Capella as De Grummond does to fill pages in her book. He was Roman, for one thing, not Etruscan, and he flourished in the fifth century CE, long after the Etruscans had been culturally assimilated into the Roman majority. Whatever Capella knew about Etruscan religion was second-hand knowledge at best. This is not to say that he can say nothing about Etruscan religion, but we do need to examine that poetic text with a bit of caution.

While De Grummond is too busy copy-and-pasting De Nuptiis Philologiae Et Mercurii (On the Marriage of Mercury and Philology) without any sort of insightful commentary, the rest of us should first be looking at the Piacenza Liver itself to see what it says about the structure of the Etruscan cosmos, before gazing onward to outside sources for potential red herrings. Second of all, her overreliance on Greco-Roman factoids to crack the Etruscan mystery makes it seem as though she is genuinely ignorant of the simple fact that the practice of haruspicy is derived neither from Italy nor from Greece but from the Near East. It's really dizzying to me to think that an "expert" has failed to learn this. So in effect, she looks to the wrong cultures when she should be making comparisons to Hittite and Babylonian religion. She's so wildly off the mark that it's hard for me to read her books without grumbling under my breath. When you note the similarity of the Piacenza Liver with a Babylonian artifact dated to the early second millenium (shown below), you'll understand where my tormented frustration is coming from in regards to De Grummond's research skills.


The connection between the Babylonian artifact and the Etruscan artifact is clear and undeniable. So I think there might be a more advanced way to look at the Piacenza Liver that brings in line various modern facts of ancient history and in a way that's more comprehensive.

(Continue reading Finding structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap - Part 2.)

NOTES
^[1] De Grummond, Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend (2006), p.44 (see link).
^[2] See De Grummond/Simon, The Religion of the Etruscans (2006), p.3: "It expresses vividly the Etruscan tendency to be vague or ambivalent about the gender and other characteristics of a particular deity."