The "Tages mirror" superimposed on the Piacenza Liver

I'm back on that Etruscan mirror again from before when I talked about how I was wondering what exactly the haruspicial priest in the center of the scene was looking at. Is he just looking at the liver in general or is there something more specifically being pointed to? What is the overall message of this mirror? Since its contents remain a frustrating mystery to specialists, it won't hurt if I suggest a few new thoughts of my own.

One thing that I've been contemplating for a while is the idea that the artist of this bronze image worked into the back of the mirror had purposely but subtly divided things into an inner section and an outer section. I've highlighted the two sections of the image that I perceive above in different colours. I notice that the central portion pertains to the mortal world, especially if the character assumed to be Tages (without clear proof, mind you) is really just a human priest afterall. Then the outer portion shows a surrounding entourage of four gods, the metaphysical world of the holy.

This outer portion, if I'm seeing this correctly, is rather interesting because it now reminds me of the outer portion of the Piacenza Liver, the bronze liver model used by haruspexes to divine the future. Yet since this is precisely what the priest is doing in the above scene, divining the future with a sheep's liver, this connection seems all the more tantalizing. Is the outer portion symbolic of the horizon and of the four directions just as it's symbolized on the liver? Is the artist symbolically equating the mirror with the cosmos itself?


Taking this notion further, the four gods surrounding the scene may very well be alluding to the four directions, the same directions according to which the Etruscan priest was obligated to align himself in order to perform his rites faithfully at all. The god above is quite clearly the sun and his chariot, appearing much like Sol Invictus. So let's start with what we know.

Consulting the Piacenza Liver as I understand it now, the border shows among other things that Tinia (as sun) represents both the highest position of the sky according to a vertical axis, and also at the same time, it represents south according to a horizontal axis. The position of Tluschva faces that of Tinia on the opposite side of the liver, suggesting that he similarly represents the watery deeps of the universe while also lord of the north. This south-focused orientation, odd as it may seem to us today^[1], properly relates the position of the god of the dead inscribed with Fufluns (an epithet of Pacha, ie. Bacchus), with the west. The west is the direction of the setting sun and by extension the direction of departing souls. Then finally Cilens, god of darkness, is to the east reminding one of classical creation myths where a primordial darkness was envisioned for the beginning of time, much as every morning begins with darkness.

Since the highmost god in the outer portion of the mirror above is without a doubt the sun and can then be identified with Tinia riding in his quadriga, then according to this symbolic comparisons, the bearded Velthune is easily explained as synonymous with death. We might interpret the sun right next to him as the setting sun, the sun of the west, the sun of departing souls. The mirror itself like many of these recovered mirrors, might I remind, was intended as a grave offering and so this interpretation is perfectly à-propos. The youthful god marked as Rathlth (pronounced with two syllables as /'ɾɑtʰl̩tʰ/) to the left then is the east, coincidentally the direction of birth and youth. I'm encouraged by the many interesting matches here. Finally the winged god must be Tluschva, god of depths and the north.

With the left and right deities being connected with East and West, Birth and Death, respectively, my thoughts focus back on our lady Ucernei hiding shyly behind her husband. Does the sun set behind Velthune to convey that she was fated to die? Is this her mirror of destiny?


NOTES
^[1] Egyptians also oriented their geography according to the south. See Moret/Davy, From tribe to empire: Social organization among primitives and in the ancient East (1926), p.279 (see link); Brewer/Teeter, Egypt and the Egyptians (2007), p.18 (see link).

The dank bowels of earth

Memiyawanzi remarks lately on the use of γῆ κατ' εὐρώσσ' 'dank earth below' in the oddly named post Dank earth and ejaculations. It inspires me to take a crack at this interesting and potentially profound concept. For me, the subtle phrase in Greek can be understood as part of a much larger concept that goes well beyond Homer or the borders of Greece, pertaining to the world of the dead as it was once conceived.

Hades is described as 'cold', 'dark' and 'watery'. This is equally a description of the literal earth that we dig up when we bury the dead, showing us the analogy involved here and its evolution. The rivers in Hades that are later named (ie. Acheron, Styx, etc.) are relatively recent add-ons to the initial analogy of burial and moist earth. In Ugaritic texts, we read instances of 'filth' in reference to the city of the underworld, directly derived from the image of the deceased being laid to rest in the literal filth of the earth. Hence, the underworld came to be seen by many cultures of the Mediterranean to be cold, dark and moist. This was also the understanding of Etruscans who traded afterall with the Greeks and who absorbed many traditions from the Near East.

However, I believe the symbolism goes one step further. The very rites of Etruscans which were designed to divine the future from the internal organs of sheep, themselves imported traditions traced back to Babylonian extispicy, are necessarily built on a lost metaphor of the Earth, not only as cold, dark and moist but also a living deity, complete with innards. From the metaphor of a living earth, ancients reasoned further that the sun, as it passes under the horizon in the west and underneath the earth to rise again in the east, is effectively passing through the bowels of the earth. The way in which the sun passes through the world of the dead below and how it's effectively reborn every morning was a directly significant and life-affirming image to ancient believers throughout the eastern Mediterranean, whether Greek, Etruscan, Hittite or Egyptian. People ancient and modern have mourned their loved ones and often need to believe in a greater purpose to mortal life, sometimes straining to see any hope, even a blind metaphor-induced one.


Knowing now the source behind expressions like 'bowels of the earth'^[1] and Etrusco-Babylonian haruspical rites, we're armed with the power not only to crack the intended meaning of some obscure Greek texts or comprehend the purpose of some Etruscan artifacts, but we're also capable now of seeing a glimpse into the heliocentric belief system of the Minoans in the same region. The Minoans left traces in their murals and their stories carried on by the Greeks. The mystery of the labyrinth unravels itself and we recognize it as a representation of the entrails of the earth. The living Earth is the maze of innards. As anthopomorphic goddess, she protects her holy symbol of immortal life within her, the labrys. The Minotaur becomes transparent as Death incarnate (cf. the Ugaritic death god, Mot), with whom Theseus wrestles in the dead of night. Here, Theseus can only represent the immortal, heroic Sun^[2] who in Herculean fashion conquers death. We see this not only by his function but also by his non-Greek name built on a Proto-Aegean root *tʰes- 'to dawn' (> Etruscan θesan 'dawn').

The Minoan mural below, tragically described as showing a 'secular' act by some stunted historians^[3], is replete with iconography. The tanned youth representing the sun 'floats' in the air atop the living bull of the underworld between two ladies representing the horizons of east and west and forming the invisible Horns of Consecration (cf. Egyptian aker). In sacrifice, this same bull might be offered to the gods and his organs interpreted by priests just as if the animal were literally Death incarnate^[4], perhaps holding important omens of the future in his murky, dank depths.




NOTES
^[1] Compare equivalent expressions in the Semitic world like Ugaritic l-kbd ’arṣ 'in the bowels of the earth' where kbd refers to both the literal viscera of an organism and also metaphorically as the interior of something.
^[2] Rev C W Jones, On mythology in funereal sculpture in Parker, The archaeology of Rome (1877), p.27 (see link).
^[3] Nilsson, The Minoan-Mycenaean religion and its survival in Greek religion (1971), 2nd edition, p.374 (see link). In a failed attempt at erudition, the author dug himself into a corner with a contrived attempt to impose his own atheism on ancient cultures: "It is often assumed that Minoan bull-fighting was a sacral performance, but there is nothing in the Minoan monuments to prove that it was more than a very popular secular sport."; Renfrew, The emergence of civilisation: The Cyclades and the Aegean in the third millennium BC (1972), p.435: "Whether or not it had a religious origin and significance, which is not certain, these representations are entirely secular in flavour, expressing often the dramatic contrast in the anatomies of bull and leaper." Again, an exaggerated emphasis on secular interpretation of bull-leaping at the expense of a competent and convincing explanation of its source.
^[4] Castleden, Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete (1993), p.168 (see link) laments: "The bull sacrifice was probably a regular occurrence at the temples, yet it is very rarely depicted: the scene with the tressed bull on its sacrificial table shown on the Agia Triadha sarcophagus is a rarity."

The "Tlusc Mar" Reading Error on the Piacenza Liver

Today, I'm just making a brief note about yet another tiny detail that irks me about the common (mis)analysis of the Piacenza Liver (that is, the Etruscan artefact cast in bronze modelling a sheep's liver for the purposes of rather idiosyncratic divination, for those yet unfamiliar).

I notice that there are far too many books on Etruscan mythology that casually transcribe one of the inscriptions (as depicted above) on the object as "Tlusc Mar" without a modicum of explanation as to how it was reasoned that it should be read this way. Afterall, if this reading is correct, we need to have a damn good excuse as to why the third line is read before the second line, and furthermore, why a perfectly sane reading of "c" which conforms to the overall direction of the inscription is forfeited in favour of a reading of "m" which forces our line of vision to rotate more than 90 degrees. What the...?! The question I put forth to the world is: "Why has a less opaque reading of Tlusc Arc been so avoided?"

So while Larissa Bonfante et alia continue to publish their books with a historically distractive reading of "Tlusc Mar" or "Mar Tlusc" in them^[1], I cringe each day wondering whether these assumedly learned people have simply overlooked this academic stain in the rug or whether the apparently glaring error is deliberate obfuscation for reasons well outside the hallowed domain of truth-seeking.

Things that make you go... hmmm...


NOTES
^[1] See Bonfante/Bonfante, The Etruscan Language (2002), p.174 (see link).

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.

Solving the inner portions of the Piacenza Liver

As promised, I want to share some new ideas concerning the Piacenza Liver (see pic here). The Piacenza Liver is an Etruscan bronze model used for haruspicy (i.e. divination using sheep's livers) for those that aren't familiar with it. Despite the fact that this object was retrieved in 1877, the full meaning of this object and its relationship to Etruscan mythology remains an infuriating mystery. Perhaps I'm an impatient fellow but as far as I'm concerned, there are many mysteries that strike me as not being true mysteries, but rather artificial mysteries that our society holds onto like a security blanket against the "fear of the known" that presumably makes life more dull. As for me, I can't resist a good puzzle to solve, so to each one's own.

I'll just cut straight to the chase of my overall thoughts on this subject with a graphic here below:



Maybe this seems a little Dumezilian, however I notice that the inner portion of the artefact can be arranged into three equal parts that may relate to a tripartite world-view of celestial, earthy and infernal worlds. This would then imply that the wheel like structure of six portions may relate to the underworld while the deities next to the "mountain" on the other lobe of the liver may relate to the goings-on of the heavens. In the center, where we find the heroic demigod Heracle and an unknown deity named Methlumth (n.b. meθlum means "people"), priests may have prophecized more on matters of the physical, earthly world of humankind.

I have a lot more to say but chew on that for a while. I'll be back.

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."