The winds and the Piacenza Liver

Yes, folks. I still have a bone to pick about the Etruscan Piacenza Liver. So much to analyse and so little time. As previously stated, I suspect that the Piacenza Liver might be understandable in terms of three cosmological regions representing the overworld (the world of sky deities), middleworld (the world of humankind) and underworld (the world of the dead and chthonic deities), as per the following diagram:


I now want to briefly talk about the region just below the pyramid in the overworld portion of the artifact. Notice how it's divided into eight sections? Since eight is simply four times two, I can't help but feel that this has something to do with the winds, parallel to the Greek winds (Boreas, Zephyrus, Eurus & Notus). Yet if this parallel is valid, why eight instead of four?

Let's look at how these sections are marked. They read from left to right, top to bottom: caθa, tins θneθ, fuflus, θuflthas, lasl, tins θuf, leθm and tul. The first thing that I notice in this grouping is that they can easily be divided into four male deities (tins θneθ, fuflus, tins θuf, tul) and four female deities (caθa, θuflthas, lasl, leθm). Though the artifact uses abbreviations, we may surmise as to who these deities are thanks to a parallelism with Roman mythology and a working knowledge of the Etruscan language. The male deities are thus: Tin Thneth (Thundering Tin), Fuflun (Bacchus), Tin Thufl (Tin of Oath) and Tul (Boundary). The female deities are thus: Caθa (Abundance), Thufltha (She of Oath), Lasa (Nymph) and Letham (Streams). Tin Thneth and Tin Thufl are two incarnations of Tin (the daytime sun) and clearly parallel to Roman Jupiter Tonans and Jupiter Fidius respectively. Given the arrangement of these deities in the tiny grid and the apparent functions of these deities, we might seperate them into four celestial pairs, no doubt then representing the four cardinal directions or winds: Fuflun & Catha (north); Tin Thneth & Thufltha (south); Tul & Letham (west); and Tin Thufl & Lasa (east).

For added interest, we may note that Catha and Fuflun are already known to form a religious pair since TLE 131 (Laris Pulena's sarcophagus) appears to indicate funerary devotion enacted specifically in the name of these two earthly deities.

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).

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.

Itching to crack the Piacenza Liver soon

Sorry that I've been busy, everyone. However I have a fresh entry just itching to be written about the Etruscan Piacenza Liver, a bronze model of a sheep's liver created for the ritualistic practice called haruspicy in order to divine the future. It's clear that this quirky practice originated from the Near East and there are similar Babylonian liver models fashioned many centuries preceding Etruscan civilization that I've compared on this blog before. The only tricky part is the fact that the Etruscan liver model and the Babylonian counterparts don't seem to coincide very nicely together aside from some general similarities. I've never found any author who has adequately explained the entire significance of this Etruscan artefact in ritual and mythology. Explanations are always vague with little to offer, not even a plausible theory.

That being said, after obsessing over it this past week, I noticed some new and interesting patterns that I want to share with everyone involving the mysterious interior sections marked with names of deities. While the outer border is plainly representive of the 16 directions of the cosmos, the inner sections seem to be connected to less well-known mythological structures or concepts that are important nonetheless to our understanding of Etruscan world-view. On one lobe of the liver there is a circular structure of six deities while on the other lobe there appears to be a mountain-like structure under which lie eight deities. Then there is a central flat section which doesn't seem to be connected to the two opposing, aforementioned structures as well as a fourth, the teardrop structure corresponding to the gall bladder which is allotted to four more deities.

My question is this: What do these structures signify and why are they placed in this way?

Well I think I have a lot to say on this now. Teehee! So stay tuned and in the meantime see if you readers can make sense of the Piacenza Liver inscriptions as pictured above.

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."

Piacenza Liver and Transliteration Hanky-Panky

If you're not convinced that we should question everything that we read, this should help kickstart your devil's advocate.

There are a lot of Etruscan inscriptions where the notable experts of this field can't seem to agree on what letters should be read from them. The disagreements would make sense if, let's say, the debated inscriptions were hard-to-read because of damage. However, when the disagreements involve clearly inscribed artifacts like the Piacenza Liver, it insults me as an astute reader and leads me to believe that Etruscology has one of the lowest standards of scholarship of any field of history.

The disagreement in question involves the underside of the Piacenza Liver artifact where we find two words: tivr usils. Larissa Bonfante has written that the word found on the artifact is indeed tivr, while Jean-René Jannot in Religion in Ancient Etruria (2005) claims that the word in question is tivs. In other words, some read "sigma", some read "rho", and the reader is caught in the cross-fire of an inane technicality.

Let's get busy: Which is the correct version of the story and which one's the fraud? Thankfully, pictures are worth a thousand words and I urge anyone to look at the artifact before believing anyone blindly:

The above drawing of the inscription makes clear that the word is tivr, not tivs, and if you should be skeptical at all, the real-life photo of the Piacenza Liver will lead you precisely to the same conclusion; the rho is clear and unmistakable, even in this grainy photo:

Jean-René Jannot loses this round. We'd expect that an academic authority worth his degree would get a simple inscription like this straight, seeing as how the artifact has been available for study for many decades now. So shame on you, J.R., for telling the reader fibs that are thankfully easy to falsify.

Curiously however, Larissa Bonfante cites in Etruscan (Reading the Past) in 1990 (on page 62 under Appendix 2 - Glossary of Etruscan words): tiu, tiv-, tiur moon, month. Yet, as above, there is no genitive form tivs, thus no such *tiv-, and since she does not source her citations, it is very hard to be sure whether tiu is real or yet another bad transliteration caused perhaps by improper word segmentation! Tiur however is well attested and real:

tiur [PyrT 2.iv; TCort vi] (na.sg.) // tiiurś [TLE 749], tivrs [TLE 181] (gen.sg.) // tiuri-m [LL 2.iii, 2.xv, 3.xxiii, 4.ii, 5.iv, 8.xxi, 8.xxxv, 9.iii, 9.xi] (loc.sg.)
(LL = Liber Linteus; PyrT = Pyrgi Tablets; TCort = Tabula Cortonensis; TLE = Testimonia Linguae Etruscae)

This shows me that even experts are a little confused about what is reality and what is not. But don't worry, we'll get this all straightened out one day.

Etruscan 'usil': It ain't the "sun"

The general public, if they ever should come across the topic of the Etruscans at all, doesn't fully understand the fact that most foremost Etruscologists lack linguistic training and have published many falsehoods about the translation of Etruscan words and grammar. Academics with degrees are hardly infallible and are not experts in everything they touch so it is our duty as readers to question what we read. Sometimes even a student can show a sensei a thing or two.

Etruscan usil is unanimously translated as "sun". We see this published everywhere, so I realize that questioning it only arms dismissive spindoctors to label me an iconoclast who thrives on sacrilege. I can do little about petty politics and time is better spent constructively getting at the heart of this nonsense by asking a direct question and seeking an answer to it.

What proofs demonstrate clearly that usil must mean "sun"?

The answer to that is straight-forward. We see a couple of mirrors where the word "usil" is inscribed next to a character shown in a kind of "aura" (see pic: [1]). Further, Massimo Pallottino in The Etruscans (1975) had connected usil to a Sabine word ausel- and this etymology seemed to lull critics into submission. What here is there to question?

Well, this isn't the whole story at all. To translate a word properly we should seek consistency by taking note of all instances of this word, including any inflected forms that we can identify with our grammatical model of Etruscan. This is called the combinatory method and it is a fully accepted part of the mainstream linguist's toolkit. Linguists also are taught to avoid the trap of folk etymology and avoid building one's case on deceptive look-alike words. Thus the Sabine doppelganger, without any other evidence to back it up, has no weight particularly when the lack of initial a- in ausel- in the Etruscan counterpart cannot be explained without special pleading (nb. Etruscan allows au/v- at the beginning of words: avil, Aule, avratum, etc.). These loose threads just aren't convincing in linguistics.

I've been building up a personal computer database of Etruscan vocabulary and any instances in indexed artifacts to keep ultra-organized. Currently I have the following specs on this etymon:

usil [LL 7.xi; TLE 417] (na.sg.) // usils [TLE 719] (gen.sg.) // usli [LL 7.xiii] (loc.sg.)
(LL = Liber Linteus, TLE = Testimonia Linguae Etruscae)

So since we are trying to expose the inner contradictions of Massimo Pallottino's translation, we should start by accepting Massimo Pallottino's own grammatical sketch of Etruscan that explains that -s is a genitive marker (conveying the word "of") and -i is a locative marker (equivalent to English prepositions of location: "at", "on", "upon", "in", etc.). Already, we can see a problem of consistency.

If usli of the Liber Linteus is the locative case form of the unmarked nomino-accusative case form usil as attested on the mirrors, translating it as "at/in/upon/on the sun" is utterly inane. Before we seek excuses, let me remind you that no one has the logical justification to "tweak" any translation that doesn't fit with more ad hoc assumptions. That conduct is not helpful.

It gets worse. We find usils on the back of the Piacenza Liver (see http://users.tpg.com.au/etr/etrusk/po/liver.html) and it could only be understood as a genitive form. It is found not alone, but together with the word tivr which is well attested to mean "month" in the Liber Linteus as well as in a few funerary inscriptions (TLE 181, TLE 749). It may be also translated as "moon" since this is normally a synonym for "month" in countless languages including English. Yet if these facts are all kosher, this gives us "month/moon of the sun". Now, what month is that on the as-yet-obscure Etruscan calendar pray tell? On second thought, do not pray tell. We can't throw logic out the window and drum up any old excuse about why "month of the sun" is somehow supposed to make sense, because it clearly doesn't.

There is a notable derivative of usil, namely *uslan, which is attested in its locative, uslane (LL 5.xxi). We must recognize its context, found in a sentence "Cis-um thesane uslane-c mlache." We know that the word thesan means "dawn" since a goddess by that name is attested on mirrors too but her mythological connections are less controversial. So if thesane means "at dawn", it specifies a time of action. Since -c is the conjunctive, usilane too is part of this temporal noun phrase. Thus, it must refer to a point in time on a par with "at dawn". Symmetry seems the simplest answer, leading us to a more sensible translation of usilane as "at dusk". The phrase probably reads "And the three [things] were blessed at dawn and at dusk." Does this fit all the other instances too?

If we translate usil as "dusk" or "setting" instead of "sun", we start to realize how the aura of the deity found on the mirrors may in fact represent the aura of the sun setting beneath the horizon. Furthermore, we again have a more satisfying symmetry on one mirror of deified Thesan "Dawn" and Usil "Dusk" before the god of the ocean. The symbolism is clear: Dawn and Dusk represent the two extremes of the horizon and it is the ocean that keeps the two apart. Further, the classical dawn-to-dusk metaphor as symbolic of an individual's lifetime from birth to death, as used in the famous Riddle of the Sphinx, is particularly meaningful on tomb offerings which these mirrors happen to be.

What then does the backside of the Piacenza Liver signify? Instead of "month/moon of the sun", we discover a more natural translation: "Moon of dusk" (or possibly "Setting Moon" if the "setting" in this context is intended to be of the moon rather than of the sun). What this moment signifies in Etruscan ritual would be a matter of debate but it at least shows a real point in time that finally works with the known morphology. That's leaps better than suggesting a month whose existence we have to hypothesize or an entirely nonsensical phrase "moon of the sun", all based on whimsical interpretations of artifacts, ad hoc folk etymologies, and a basic lack of respect for linguistic principles.