Picking at TLE 939 some more

I feel like revisiting artifact TLE 939 (aka ET Cr 0.4). There are a lot of different versions of the story on this and translations are hampered by irritating transcription disagreements and, alas, few clear photos available to the general public. I can only suspect for now the following tentative translation until I learn more about this object and the roots of some of the hapaxes involved:

Zusa tunina atiuθ arvasa aφanuva-θi, masuve-m
The cleansed wrapped body is lifted among the families, then before the tomb.

Maniχiur ala alχuvai, sera Turannuve.
The ancestors lie with the laid, and they remain with Turaniu.

In Elusisnial, θui uria-θi.
They are of the Elysium, united in bliss.

Litil-ta lipile-ka Turanuve.
The sacrifice and this libation is with Turaniu.

Ec mimari.
They shall remember.

Matesi, ara Turanuve Velusinase χeθai.
On behalf of the gathering, (he) is raised before Turaniu of Volsinii with fish.

Ara ina asi.
He is raised by them through burning.

Ikan ziχ akarai.
This text shall be done.

The translation is amenable to change. However, if I'm not mistaken, the text is detailing a series of fascinating Etruscan rites used toward someone's burial service. The sequence is expected: a burial procession, a presentation of holy offering, a cremation of deceased and offering, then the final entombment of the urn containing the ashes. Somewhere in all of that we also expect a burial banquet, a kind of "last supper" with the dear departed.

To tackle the phrase zusa tunina atiuθ, I first assume that zusa (if properly parsed) refers to the physical 'body' of the deceased. It's interesting then to note that the Latin word tunica has an unknown etymology but is thought to be Etruscan. I wonder. Is it from a form such as *tunaχ 'wrapping, cloth'? Assuming then a native underlying verb root tun- 'to wrap', tunina could reasonably be interpreted then as an adjective in -na conveying 'wrapped'. Analysis of atiuθ points to an intransitive participle of aθ which I've so far attributed a transitive meaning to: 'to clean'. To be grammatically consistent, I'll have to ammend slightly to 'to be clean'. The text in the Tabula Capuana gives the sequence ita eθ aθene which could mean "that herein was made clean." The verb arvasa should be a passive derivative in -va of ar 'to lift, to raise'. It all seems to fit together coherently, if I do say so myself.

The sequence elusisnial is hard to miss and its connection with the Elysium (Ἠλύσιον), the Greek conception of the afterlife, is rather tempting considering the other burial keywords of this text. This would suggest that Elusisna was the corresponding Etruscan term for their City of the Dead. Elusisnial is its type-II genitive form.

The pronoun form ina is also interesting and I've already noted ana from TLE 27. They must be oblique forms (ie. non-nomino-accusative forms) for the third person. The use of ina for human plural agents could mean, as I've predicted for a while, that third person pronouns have a quirk such that plural 'they' was conveyed by the same pronoun as the inanimate 'it'. This isn't too far from the situation in English where our three singular choices of 'he', 'she' and 'it' collapse to the undifferentiated plural 'they'. One would need only further contemplate the result of collapsing 'it' and 'they' together and one would understand the Etruscan situation as I've suggested it.

What I still don't understand though is how I'm supposed to interpret Turaniu. In the name we have the diminutive suffix -iu and it simply means "Little Turan". The name's use on one mirror to label a cupid-like deity described as an Etruscan version of the divine boy Eros doesn't help me understand the emergence of this deity in this context. However it makes me start thinking instead of the significance of the neighbouring Kore cult of the Greeks. Kore means 'little girl' or 'maiden' in Greek and is the byname of Persephone who, among other things, was the lady of the dead, wife of none other than Hades. It makes sense if Turaniu here is functioning as a deity of rebirth and the immortal soul. A child-like deity would fit the image of eternal youth.

Flights of fancy and ornithomancy

Duane Smith over at Abnormal Interests makes mention of The birds in the Iliad - Identities, interactions and functions by Karin Johansson. This is an excellent and welcomed addition to educational resources on the net and I will be going through it to try to gain insight into the religious practice of ornithomancy in Etruria. It's worth learning everything we can about this ancient science made out of observing birds and their paths across the sky because it's a central component in life and faith in Etruria. Without knowing this, we can only understand Etruscan civilization at a distance.

While the author states "The methodologies in bird divination differed in different parts of the world, such as in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Etruria and Rome," I respectfully doubt that there is enough known about Etrurian religion to be secure with that claim. There is little way thus far to accurately gauge that "difference". More likely there are connections, many connections, that continue to be missed by Etruscanists who as yet still have a hard time deciphering much of the language and rely, perhaps too much, on the second-hand reports of Romans rather than reading the extant Etruscan-language works like the Liber Linteus or Tabula Capuana directly.

Lasa and the transgendered deity

The consensus on the Etruscan term lasa is that it may be equivalent to the Greek concept of 'nymph'. "It might be possible someday to establish some kind of correspondence between Lasa and the Greek concept of nymph," states Roman and European Mythologies by Yves Bonnefoy under the heading Etruscan Daemonology on page 41. However the Bonfantes have cautioned in The Etruscan language: An introduction (2002), "Lasa Sitmica, however, is a male winged figure." At times like this, I find myself briefly chagrining, "Why does everything have to be so complicated?" But then I realize that life wouldn't be so interesting if there wasn't a new puzzle to solve.

First off, I'm toying with the idea that lasa isn't referring to some specific deity or kind of deity but instead might be translated simply as 'lady, woman'. This has benefits. For one thing, back in Anatolia, it's curiously similar to the Lycian word lada with an identical meaning. Second, rather than apply an over-specified meaning without established reasons, applying a more generalized value such as 'lady' can at once explain its use with Venus-like characters on mirrors, its use with some nymphs, and... as I will get to in a moment... possibly the problematic male lasa aforementioned.

This is where the tale of the transgendered deity comes in. Before any of you scough and giggle, there really were transsexual deities in existence in classical times, popular ones. Across Anatolia, there was a particular cult revolving around Attis, Cybele and Agdistis. In one tradition it is said that the handsome vegetation god Attis, who cyclically died every year to be reborn for the benefit of humankind (long before Jesus was invented), was esteemed greatly by Cybele, goddess of fertility. Yet he was also desired by Agdistis, the hermaphroditic deity associated with (of all things) walnuts. This created quite a mythical love triangle. Agdistis, having lost his "walnuts" one fateful day when the fearful gods of Olympus felt the need to "correct" this alternative biology, was magically transformed into a woman for all intents and purposes. Cult worshipers of this tradition were even inspired to become eunuchs in the service of this deity and this must have been one path in ancient society for many naturally transgendered people.

So coming to the mirror in question (ES 115) with the "boy" Lasa Sitmica who appears next to Atunis (= Attis) and Turan (= Cybele), I can only suspect that Lasa Sitmica might be performing the role of Agdistis. I'd be surer if I could nab a photo of that mirror but the available facsimile shown above still gives me the impression that, indeed, lasa might in this very special case be referring to transgendered Agdistis who, upon losing his male genitals, or at the very least his testicles, was considered a lady in the mindset of Etruscan culture, either as a hermaphrodite, or as in the illustration of this mirror where male features are unmistakable, as a possible eunuch.

What then is sitmica in the epithet? No specialists seem to have piped up about it, leaving me to ponder on my own. One guess I thought of is that Lasa Sitmica may mean "The Lady in Sidon". Taking away the phrase-final article -ca, lasa would be 'lady' and Sitmi then could be the locative of *Situm 'Sidon'(?). Sidon was an important Phoenician city where such eastern cults might be easily imported. No guarantees though. It's better than nothing for now and it would be one way of explaining away the curious gender conflicts inherent in the attestation of this term.


UPDATE
(2012 Feb 13) Gazing at and thinking over the mirror some more, I consider a new possibility. How are we entirely sure whether Lasa Sitmica is attributable to her male attendant or whether it is referring back to Turan? Perhaps Turan is described twice, both with her direct name and by the title Lasa Sitmi-ca 'The Lady in Sidon'. Afterall this phrase seems more in line with the historic fame of Sidon as a destination for the worship of the equivalent fertility goddess Ashtarte more than anything. The attendant then would be an unmarked feature of the background, merely a servant aiding Turan (still possibly a eunuch attendant as many chamberlains were and as many men in devotion to the Asian Cybele were).

The holy goddess of sewers

It started with looking up North African terms for 'rainbow' in Berber and Arabic. I confirmed that one Arabic expression is similar to the hypothetical Etruscan expression *Tluscval arcam that might lie behind the aforementioned abbreviation tlusc arc inscribed on the Piacenza Liver where its religious significance might have something to do with a role as messenger between sky and earth. That expression is qaws al-māʔ 'bow of the water', spoken in the Maghreb. Another rainbow expression in Berber, 'bride of the jackal', led me to the Roman Virgo Caelestis, the Latin name given to the Carthaginian goddess of the sky. To the delight of my humour bone, this then led me straight to something I hadn't come across before: Cloācina, goddess of the sewers and of the Cloāca Maxima (ie. The Great Drain of Rome). Yes, the Romans had a goddess of sewers. It's very amusing but also a natural product of a polytheistic religion that maintains that all things great and small, glorious and foul, must have a deity governing it. Stinky as this tale is, something perverse within me needed to dig further.

The name of Cloācina immediately takes hold of my attention because it could be quite easily an Etruscan name. Many Etruscan names end in -na, including those of divine epithets (eg. Aracuna 'Of the hawks', a byname of the death goddess Vanth). In fact, the Cloāca Maxima herself was the ingenious invention of Etruscan engineers to efficiently take away much of the daily filth naturally produced by its inhabitants in the city. Etruscans were master architects and founders of Rome before the Latin-speaking population became dominant so it naturally makes me wonder if the name Cloācīna and the term cloāca 'sewer' could be hidden Etruscan lexical items.

Immediately when looking it up, one will find an ample number of etymologists connecting it with cluēre 'to cleanse, purify'. Perfectly sensible. But... Latin has two homophones here and the other meaning of this verb is  'to hear, be spoken of, be said'. This latter verb is without a shred of doubt traced back to Proto-Indo-European *ḱleu- but does the other verb truly go back to PIE  *ḱleuh₁-  as often claimed by Indoeuropeanists? Etymological dictionary of Latin and the other Italic languages by Michiel de Vaan lends doubt under the heading cloāca:

"Since an original sequence *klowV- would have yielded *clau- (at least, in pretonic
position), Vine 2006a: 2l7f. posits an adj. *kleuH-o- 'clear, clean' from which a
factitive pr. *kleuH-eh₂-ie/o- > *klewāje/o- > *klowā- could have been derived. This
verb might be preserved in the Servius gloss cloare, although its reliability is often
doubted. From *clowā-, the noun cloāca can then be explained. WH and Rix argue
that cluō may have been invented by Plinius to explain Cluācīna but it might also
derive from *cluwere < *klowere < *kleuH₁-e/o-. For the root, Derksen (fthc.) reconstructs *ḱlh₃-u-, whereas Rasmussen posits *ḱleh₁-u-. If one accepts such a root structure, the ablaut *kle/ou(H)- of Latin must represent a secondary full grade based on a zero grade *kluH₁- < *klHu-C-. The short vowel of Greek κλύζω remains unexplained under any account."

So given the limited cognate set (limited to Western IE languages only) and dubious attempts to derive these words using IE-based grammar, there seems to be room for another hypothesis from outside of Indo-European. Is it possible that Etruscan had a verb *cluva 'to cleanse, to purify' that led to an adjective *cluvaχ 'clean, pure'? Through *cluvaχ, we could obtain *Cluvacuna /ˈkluwəkʊˌna/ '(She) of the pure' leading to Latin Cloācīna. We'd also have the basis for Latin cloāca 'sewer', now to be understood as a loanword and nothing to do with Proto-Indo-European. The instance of cluce in the Liber Linteus could be translated as a perfective 'has purified' (< ? earlier *cluvace), a verb to be expected in a ritual text.

Explaining away "tlusc arc"

A commenter reminded me of some unresolved issues regarding tlusc arc, written on the Liver of Piacenza artifact. The inscription in question can be seen inside the blue box in the picture above. To get to properly solving this inscription, we must overcome a few lazy misanalyses that still stifle any progress in the field. First, there's the persistent misanalysis of Tluschva as a "plurality of gods", even though the suffix -cva is already well-known to be grammatically inanimate (see Paleoglot: The nonsense about the Etruscan god Tluschva). The second problem is the whimsical misreading of *tlusc mar instead of reading it simply with respect to a single direction of writing as tlusc arc (see Paleoglot: The "Tlusc Mar" reading error on the Piacenza Liver). In search of a legitimate explanation of this elusive deity that specialists fail to offer, I've come to my own conclusions that Tluscva must be the Etruscan sea god, like Roman Neptune or Greek Poseidon. His name then likely means "Depths" and his positional opposition to Tinia, the highest of all gods in the pantheon, on the outer rim of the same artifact solidifies this interpretation.

Given this new analysis however, we're still left wondering what tlusc arc could refer to. We can see that the first element of the epithet is abbreviated for the full name Tlusχva (as shown on another inscription). Is the second word abbreviated in this cramped space as well? I suspect so. Arcumna and Arcmsna appear to be the only plausible comparisons we can make in the available Etruscan lexicon to date but this in itself tells neither what the epithet should mean nor the names.

Not accepting a dead end, I extended my search further, finding Latin arcus 'bow' in the process. The received wisdom among Indo-Europeanists is that the Latin term must stem from PIE *h₂érkʷo-. However this is one of many roots listed by IEists that fall on tenuous evidence. It could just as well be yet another substrate word passed off as a valid IE term. The compared Germanic neuter *arhwō 'arrow' doesn't entirely match the formation seen in Latin and a purely Germano-Italic term does not make for a strongly argued IE root. This naturally leads those like Donald Ringe to concede doubt of its thinly accepted IE origin and this naturally in turn makes me wonder if an Etrusco-Rhaetic word is at the heart of it.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that Arcumna and Arcmsna are built on a word *arcam 'bow' (later *arcum > *arcm due to syncope). The Germanic word in *-ō then would be a reflex of Old Etruscan /-əm/ in *arcam presuming that the word was borrowed (perhaps through the Veneti) before Grimm's Law had occurred, sometime in the early 1st millennium BCE. The trading of bows and arrows between the Etrusco-Rhaetic population and northern Italian peoples would be historically expected and natural (particularly if we assume an Adriatic point-of-entry of Etrusco-Rhaetic people from the River Po). The above two names would then mean "Of the bow" and "Of the archer" respectively (if *arcamis = 'archer' with agent suffix -is). Coming back to tlusc arc, we might fill this out as *Tlusχval Arcam "The bow of Tluschva". Granted, my idea is cursed with little evidence either way but it's worth a try, if anything, because it will inspire others to come up with something better.

But what then would "The bow of Tluschva" refer to, if so? Latin arcus, aside from meaning simply 'bow', has a secondary meaning of 'rainbow' as in pluvius arcus 'rainbow' or literally 'bow of rain'. Even in French we say arc-en-ciel for 'rainbow', literally 'bow-in-sky' and other Romance languages have similar phrases. Perhaps there's a connection. Or perhaps not. However, the inscription's presence in the celestial zone should be noted. Additionally, according to Hesiod's Theogony, the goddess of the rainbow Iris is the daughter of Thaumas, a sea deity. The other daughter of Thaumas, twin sister of Iris, was coincidently named Arke. If this is all innocent coincidence, we have to agree that it's an interesting one to ponder over.

New atheists and old debates

I've just read the June 2007 article The New Atheists at the Nation by Ronald Aronson reflecting on the rise of atheism, particularly in published literature, in America during the height of the Bush regime. "Atheism" as we're exploring it here is in a broader sense of a "lack of belief in or devotion to invisible cartoon characters called 'gods'". During that period of time, as we all recall, religion was pushed on us like crack cocaine as the economy was coincidently dismantling itself brick by brick, evolving into the exciting roller coaster of red it is today. (Notice how I've cleverly employed a reflexive mood to avoid speaking of any hypothetical agents that may or may not have been treasonously involved in this transitive but possibly non-agentive act of "dismantling".)

Back to atheism, one question implied is to what end should atheism be expected to supply us with "hope" in our daily lives? Aronson reasons:

"Living without God means turning toward something. To flourish we need coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life's vital questions."

But flourish by what definition and by who's standards? A rationalist may recognize in this subtle statement the attempt to politicize mere truth here. That is, the simple truth that any argument that unnecessarily invokes hypotheses about the existence of an invisible, unmeasurable being to explain the unknown is by any rational definition invalid. We don't need anything. We flourish just fine by logical means and it's the irrational that suffer immensely. Rather it remains Religion's onus to explain why it's had the right all this time to manipulate reason away from tried-and-true Logic to give us all the illusion of an answer to life's vital questions. Why must atheism be expected to attain an ideal that Religion has itself failed to reach? More manipulation.

Additionally why must we, in a world absent of benevolent sprites, "turn" to anything other than Logic (and thus to atheism as a result of that Logic)? What other mode of thought is as functionally complete? What kind of competent adult prioritizes invisible beings over the measurable, the unknown before the known? What does that implicit set of priorities say about such individual's psychological and cognitive state and why should we "respect" their banter by silencing our challenges? If organized religions (ie. cults) manage to still hold on, I'm bold enough to argue that it's precisely because mental illness too persists.

Another observation of his catches my eye: "In recent polls, far more respondents have declared themselves willing to vote for a woman or African-American for President than for an atheist--atheists are more unpopular than gays." As a gay atheist, I sadly must concur, so I guess that means I'm doubly maligned. Triply so if you count being constantly outspoken against nonsense. (Nobody likes a loud mouth, they say.) To prove that point, ignorant hysteria has once again hit the fan recently, this time over transgender Chaz Bono's involvement in Dancing with the Stars. According to some lunatics, her on-air trysts may somehow cause a transsexual apocalypse, kind of like a Borg collective but with rainbow flair perhaps.

The sense of true compassion, the purposeful attempt to understand another person's perspective within reason, has been lost as religious leaders either condemn others with outright loathing or confront them with insincere politesse drenched in disrespect and willful stupidity. This just leads back to how it's ironically organized religion that's failing to offer a life-affirming purpose to individual existence. It's this continued apathy of the religious, their self-contradictions and their increasingly nihilist undertones that are sure to eventually unseat Religion's common allure, even without the help of outspoken atheists.

I dedicate these musings of thought to the Temple of Numbers

When I tripped over the online Perseus entry for the word χάος which alludes to the Pythagoreans, it inspired me to pursue another new trail to experience. My google-fingers floated my mind across the ocean of cyberspace until I docked at a website about Pythagoras of Samos. Some fun reflections emerged from the deeps.

Pythagoreans are often said to be an important part of the foundation of modern science and mathematics. However I never really took the time to soak in how these philosophies contributed to modern rationalism and atheism. In a general sense, we might get away with saying that theories like those of the Pythagoreans arose from the rubble of religious contradictions noticed by the most astute iconoclasts of that period, offering us a new set of eyes to gaze into the heavens with, a new method of perceiving the cosmos whose doctrine would be increasingly shaped by logic and deductive reason.

It seems to me that a silent sin of religion is that it abstractifies the infinite Unknown into a fear-inspiring overlord standing over our helpless fate. But a deity is just our common anxieties anthropomorphized. The logic born from Pythagoras and similar philosophies brings remedy to that spiritual tyranny, lamping the path to our self-salvation, overthrowing the sadomasochism inherent in the unhealthy relationship between human and "God". So is it sacrilegious as an atheist to cede after all that that, in a sense, logical truth is Divinity expressed? Is Logic, floating on its flimsy axiomatic foundation called "existence", ironically nothing more than the most optimal faith of faiths?

And so I dedicate these humble offerings of finite perception to the Temple of Numbers. May it compute correctly. Amen.

In front and in back

This is pretty interesting... Puhvel's Hittite Etymological Dictionary under the term marzai- a curious snippet of Hittite text is cited and translated: "He fritters three flatbreads and crumbles them in front and back of the male gods of the pit, he scatters fatcakes [and] meal, and libates."

The rituals cited here are the same as those of the Etruscans and, even more fun, is the fact that even the phrase "in front and back" is aped by the Liber Linteus where hante-c repine-c conveyed the identical. Common traditions in both religion and writings of the Hittite and Etruscan cultures is evident and gives us another piece of evidence in favour of an Asia Minor origin of the Etruscans (as if it weren't thoroughly proven already).

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).

Augury and redundancy

There's a curious sentence in Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition (1892), p.344:

"They invented astrology and Etruscan divination, augury, oracles, magic, mythology, and moreover taught men how to make ornate and feigned images of exquisite beauty of kings long passed away, and endowed them with other names." (bold-face mine)

This is the definition of augury. This is the definition of divination.

In what way is augury meaningfully different from divination? In what way are oracles somehow unincluded in the notions of both augury and divination?? Have my reading skills dulled??? Is the LSD catching up with me? Because I could swear that these first three nouns in the above list are reducible to one and that this Victorian-Age writer was trying too hard.

Here's another enigmatic passage I found from
Buckland, The fortune-telling book: The encyclopedia of divination and soothsaying (2003), p.xi

Again, is the author aware of what augury (ie. "the practice of foretelling by means of signs"), divination (ie. "act of foretelling future events") and soothsaying (ie. "the practice of foretelling events") really means and the ridiculous semantic similarities of all these words? His title seems to insist that there's a difference but I'm stumped because the dictionaries are saying something different. Comical stuff!

After Duane on Abnormal Interests mentioned his different understanding of augury as 'bird divination' instead of what I understood to be general omen-seeking of an augur, I came across a bunch of these confusing lines of text in Google. So I wonder, are we all on the same page about the term augury? Are there secondary "niche definitions" lurking about in the crowd that I should be aware of? It seemed to me that Etruscanists are using augury to refer to priestly divination in a general sense while other specialized terms of omen-seeking exist such as auspicy (bird-divination), brontoscopy (divination of lightning and thunder) and haruspicy (liver-divination).

Using augury as a synonym for auspicy on the other hand is simply confusing and, to me, ahistorical. Though I wonder if it has something to do with a long-standing folk-etymology that tries to derive au- in augur from avis 'bird', as is true in auspex, only to be left with an unanalysable portion, -gur. This etymology is certainly a tall tale. Augurs did more than just ornithomancy.

Dice, divination and a third

In Paleoglot: The dicey proof of Etruscan numerals, while a general *tendency* existed for two opposing sides on classical rolling dice to add up to seven, I explain that it wasn't a hard-fast rule in the past. Other possibilities existed.^[1] Nonetheless, quite a few Etruscanists and avid hobbyists will still leap to the over-assertive conclusion that the Etruscan dice *must* follow this pattern. From these sorts of precarious arguments, śa continues to be misinterpreted as 'four' instead of 'six', and huθ is misinterpreted as 'six' instead of 'four'.

In Paleoglot: Truth will shine forth (2), I outlined the Etruscan solar trinity that's directly shown on the Piacenza Liver by the names Tinia Cilensal ('Sun of Darkness' = Jupiter Sommanus), Tinia Θufal ('Sun of Oath' = Jupiter Fidius) and Tinia Θneθ ('Thundering Sun' = Jupiter Tonans). As far as I know, no specialists have bothered to explain these three entities as I have done, nor to even translate their names. All indicates an Etruscan solar triad, parallel to what can be found among the contemporaneous Egyptians (ie. Khepri, Ra and Amon).

Now let's take these two previous ideas and mash them together. We may understand the classical dice in question as exhibiting opposing sides that differ by a value of '3', rather than adding up to '7', making śa = 'six' and huθ = 'four'. Knowing that 'three' is a symbol of the solar triad and that Tinia was a deity governing divination and intellectual illumination much like Greek Apollo or Babylonian Shamash was, could the difference of 'three' between opposing sides of the dice then be a deliberate feature by the die-maker, conceptually linking games of chance with divination?


NOTES
^[1] Trosset, An Introduction to Statistical Inference and Its Applications with R (2009), p.16 (see link); Trager, Studies in linguistics, vol 19-22 (1968), p.65 (see link); The Athenæum: A journal of literature, science, the fine arts, music, and the drama (1874), p.146 (see link); Bonfante covertly admits uncertainty in Bonfante, Etruscan life and afterlife: A handbook of Etruscan studies (1986), p.229 (see link) when she begins, "If the arrangement of dots on Etruscan dice is the same as on ours, [...]" (italic mine).

Phoenician-Etruscan comparisons of iconography

U of Penn's Professor Holly Pittman offers a long list of artifact images for us to peruse at her website. Under one directory, there are two interesting pictures, one labeled "Neo-Assyrian, Nimrud, NW Palace Harem, Pit AJ, Sacred Tree, 8th Phoenician Style" and the other "Neo-Assyrian, Nimrud, Ft Shalmaneser, SW12 Plaque, Phoenician Style". I show both photos below and they show a persistent Tree of Life pattern.



They're very similar to what's found on an Etruscan mirror suggesting Punic artistic influences via ancient Carthage.


Evidently then, if we want to crack the riddle of Etruscan mythology as a whole, we must learn to look past the "safe" but limited Roman and Greek comparisons. Egyptian, Hittite, Babylonian and Phoenician comparisons are also fair game because the Classical Mediterranean boasted a complex network of interrelated cultures which were very good at distributing ideas across surprisingly large distances.

What is that Tages looking at?

The explanation of this mirror is always the same among Etruscanists and consistently comprised of the following elements:

• Pava Tarχies is assumed to mean 'Child of Tages' (cf. Latin puer 'child' and Tages).
• Veltune is assumed to be Roman Vertumnus, god of seasons and change.
• Tages is assumed to be teaching Aule of Tarchon (Avl Tarχunus) the art of haruspicial divination.
• The woman marked by Ucernei is a mystery.
• Raθlθ is another head-scratcher.

First, I will not accept the value of pava as 'child' based only on these idle look-alikes with an unrelated language like Latin. This is unmethodological. I take pava to mean instead 'prophecy' or 'divination' and thus 'The Prophecy of Tarchiie'. This fits much better with context and grammar. Note that Tarχies ends in the type-I genitive ending and so it can only ever mean 'X of Tarchiie', whatever value we decide to give pava. Certainly then, the phrase neither means 'Child Tages' nor 'Child of Tages' which both conflict with context and/or grammar. So clearly this hypothesis is already suspicious.

Second, how are we certain (aside from depending on more idle phonetic look-alikes) that Tarχies refers somehow to 'Tages'? Another hypothesis based on the much frowned-upon eyeballing technique, hmm? How to explain the missing 'r' then in the reported Roman name?

Lastly, it annoys me that despite describing the mirror repeatedly over the decades, all authors I've read insist on leaving the overall meaning of this mirror an unexplained mystery without bravely asking new questions or providing new interpretations. If the same unproven assumptions are repeated over and over without progress (as among Jean-René Jannot, Nancy De Grummond and Suzanne Rasmussen), maybe we're not asking enough questions.

Quite honestly I remain a little confused about this mirror myself but I have questions that I don't see anyone addressing so I'll just throw out some ideas I've been pondering on recently:

• What do the two nude male deities represent? They seem almost to suggest opposites: one young, the other mature; one on the left, the other to the right; one is attached to Apollonian icons (eg. laurel), the other to Martial ones (eg. spear). Are they the "young sun" (beginning of the year) versus the "old sun" (end of the year)? Are they Jove versus Anti-Jove (Veiovis)? Peace and War? North and south?


• Is the haruspex looking at something more specific than just the liver as a whole? I've been noticing that he's looking at a specific region of the liver more closely. Perhaps he spies the pyramid region displayed prominently on one side of the Piacenza Liver. Do the prophecies from this particular region of the liver suggest a more specific kind of prophecy such as the future of a city and its ruler?
  
  
• Is the sun rising in the east or setting in the west? How can we determine the orientation of this scene knowing that Etruscans considered the proper orientation of cardinal directions important to their rites? Is this a specific rite meant to convey something specific? Does it need to be performed at a certain point of day for a symbolic reason?
  
  

It's fortunate Indiana Jones wasn't an Etruscanist

I can't say I'm terribly fond of cheaply assembled tourist sites pretending to be genuine blogs and designed to lure netizens in with minimal content while laced with a minefield of ads from top to bottom. Nonetheless, ignoring the advertisement hell (just don't click any of it) and the brainless hook that visiting these tombs "will make you feel like Indiana Jones when you explore them," Maremma Guide still has some great photos here for viewers to learn from about the construction of Etruscan tombs.

I'd just hate to see a yahoo like Indiana Jones visit them though because we all remember what happened to all the other tombs that guy visited, don't we?

An offering to Tluschva

Building on my previous elaboration on the Etruscan god Tluschva, we still have a partially translated inscription whose second line needs interpretation:

kanuta larecenas lauteniθa aranθia pinies puia turuce
tlusχval marveθul faliaθere

It's rather clear that the first line of the inscription records a freedwoman named Kanuta giving an offering. I can only imagine that perhaps originally an Oscan slave-girl from the south, the Larecena household had bought Kanuta as hired help and a reasonably to-do man of the Pinie family eventually swept her off her feet in marriage. Somewhere in between she was manumitted and became a full-fledged Etruscan citizen. In the end, however it transpired, I gather the freedwoman must have gained personal wealth of her own to have made this fine offering. Not bad for a former slave. Good for her. Of course, if somebody has an alternative biography in mind, I'm open to new perspectives as long as it carefully respects the grammar of the first line.

In the second line, the god Tluschva is named recipient of Kanuta's offering and I've already identified this deity as the god of the seas, comparable to Roman Neptune, based on my interpretation of the outer rim of the Piacenza Liver. Now we just need to grasp the next two hapaxes, marveθul and faliaθere, and wrap our translation up into a package that's historically coherent.

Rex Wallace, like countless 19th-century linguists before him, indulges in idle Latin look-alikes with marones and falando on his own blog but this just isn't acceptable or productive in modern linguistics. A careful morphological breakdown must be preferred over eyeballing. Assuming that the words are parsed correctly, first and foremost marveθul must be a type-II genitive of *marveθ while faliaθere is an animate locative plural of *faliaθ. In any novel Etruscan word we may encounter, native derivations are predictably built on head-first roots. Ergo, chances are that if marveθul and faliaθere are native formations, they are built on roots mar 'to harvest' and fala 'hill; hypogeum' respectively. I give these roots these values based on a number of other inscriptions where these values seem to consistently fit. The former root is present in the Etruscan godname Maris 'Harvester', consistent with Roman Mars' original agrarian function, while I trace the latter root to a recent loan (cf. Latin fala 'siege tower') with funerary nuances.

Put it together and the whole inscription then reads: "Kanuta, freedwoman of the Larecena, Aranth Pinie's wife, gave to Tluschva of the Harvested (Tlusχval Marveθul) before those of the hypogeum". And what parallels of Tluschva of the Harvested are present in the surrounding classical world of that time, pray tell? Try the Roman god Consus, god of harvested fruits and wheat.^[1] Both Dionysius and Livy mention his connection with the god Neptune and subterranean altars were devoted to him. In the absence of other possibilities discussed online, here's a tantalizing match to consider.


NOTES
^[1] Takács, Vestal virgins, sibyls, and matrons: Women in Roman religion (2008), p.55 (see link): "On August 21st, the Romans honored Consus, god of harvested fruit, in general, and wheat, in particular. [...] The Consualia featured horse races. Since the horse was associated with Neptune's Greek equivalent, Poseidon, this was reason enough to think the festival was in honor of the equestrian Neptune (Livy 1.9.6)."

Isis dethroned

In Klaus Kuhlmann's Throne (2011), I see some debatable claims that seem rooted in a naive literalism and lack of larger vision beyond the details he labours on.


Games of semantics

• "None of the many Egyptian terms referring to the 'throne' imply the 'regal' or 'religious' connotation the word carries today."

This first statement crumbles swiftly once we realize that 'throne' is not the only way to translate these words. Given the semantics he describes, English already has a good equivalent in 'seat' - at once secular and religious, regal and commonplace. The language differences he points to are selective, imaginary and misleading.


Denying cultic reverence in the throne

• "As an object, which could be desecrated (for example, by usurpation), the Egyptian throne underwent purification rites. There is no evidence, however, of it ever having received cultic reverence or having been deified (as the goddess Isis)."

His determination to diminish the widely known historical importance of the cultic throne^[1] is odd. Whether Isis is a deified throne anthropomorphized or goddess as throne is moot; the effect is the same. Despite the many ways one might perceive this object or instrument of devotion, the rites pertaining to kingship and throne remain the same nonetheless. Isis undeniably became related to the notion of authority no matter what the origin of her cult.

This cult too extended far beyond Ancient Egypt into neighbouring cultures. It would be ignorant to deny that cultic thrones were present all around the surrounding Mediterranean, among the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Hittites, and Phoenicians. An Etrusco-Punic artifact known as the Pyrgi Tablets suggests a derivative of these earlier Egyptian traditions. The artifact replaces the Egyptian goddess with fitting foreign equivalents, Etruscan Uni and Punic Ashtarte. In that inscription, it's explicitly explained that Thefarie Viliana was raised by Uni-Ashtarte's very hand to rule the city of Caere. Both Caere and Carthage share the very Egyptian theme that Kuhlmann seems to downplay: Isis as deified throne, Isis as granter of authority. To add, consider Hattic Halmasuit, a contemporaneous "throne goddess" to Egypt's north. How well versed is Kuhlmann in surrounding non-Egyptian history?

Could he be seriously dismissing the role of Isis in kingship altogether?


Goddesses and the granting of power

• "It was mainly Ra, Atum, Amun, Geb, and Horus who confirmed pharaoh's rightful claim to power by saying 'to thee I give my throne...' (e.g., Sethe Urk. IV: 563, 571)."

Listing only male deities as those who mainly "confirm pharaoh's rightful claim to power" strikes me as a bit chauvinistic. According to Egyptian legend, Isis had resurrected the divine first king of Egypt, Osiris, from death so that he may become ruler in the underworld. As Osiris represents the mortal king, Isis acts as the source and embodiment of his authority,^[2] directly shown in her active will to restore Osiris as god-king. Consider too Cleopatra's later self-association with Isis, effectively then empowering female rule as well as male.

So if this overwhelming evidence shows that Isis granted power to the ruler and gave support to his authority, why does Kuhlmann not list Isis too as a confirmer of pharaoh's right to power? Because Isis is female? Among the matrilineal Minang people of Indonesia, property is inherited through the female line. It should not then be so unusual that it's a female granting power to male rulers. The absence of Isis in his list then is an odd gap. Is there a Victorian belief at work here enforcing an outdated notion that only male entities can ever grant males power in societies?


The false dichotomy between writing and symbol

• "The block-throne sign on the head of Isis (3st: HCE) is not a symbol but 'writing' (= s/se). It allowed the identification of iconographically undifferentiated female deities just as other hieroglyphic signs like [see symbol in article] or [see symbol in article] on the head of other goddess denoted a 'reading' as 'Nephthys' or 'Nut', respectively."

Since writing is transparently symbolic in itself, Kuhlmann's pedantics grows mildly vexing. By lumping the main female deities into a big hazy pile of confusion, he artificially incubates a different artistic analysis of the female deities compared to the male ones, imposing a sexist bias. One could equally muse that the feather atop the god Shu's head is likewise "merely writing", not a full-fledged symbol, and only used to differentiate him from a cloud of vague male gods too then. In what way can Kuhlmann prove that Egyptian goddesses are, to quote his wording, "undifferentiated" - that is, in what way are female Egyptian deities as a whole any *more* undifferentiated than male Egyptian gods as a whole? I'm not as yet convinced of a difference.


So by the end of the article, Kuhlmann is making many confident statements but which have no relevance or basis to the issues he raises. Is this consistent pattern of inventing false dichotomies to write about deliberate (ie. writing vs. symbol, the semantics of 'throne' vs. that of Egyptian terms, representation of male gods vs. the allegedly more undifferentiated female goddesses, goddess as throne vs. throne deified, etc.)? Or was it accidental that he authored this big ball of hanging threads and contrary claims?

NOTES
[1] Botterweck/Ringgren, Theological dictionary of the Old Testament, vol 7 (1995), p.240 (see link): "The throne of Pharaoh was deified at an early date in a development comparable to the deification of the 'throne seat' (ḫalmašuit) in the Old Hittite period of Boghazköy. The same hieroglyph represented both the throne and the goddess Isis."
[2] Botterweck/Ringgren, Theological dictionary of the Old Testament, vol 7 (1995), p.241 (see link): "The so-called identity theory holds that Isis as the personification of the ruler's throne represents the personified power of the throne. Jürgen Osing and Kuhlmann, however, reject any etymological, morphophonemic, or semantic connection between ś.t 'throne,' and ȝśt, 'Isis,' on the grounds that the name of the goddess derives from the root wȝś (< *ȝś) and means 'the one who has sovereign power, powerful influence.' The throne symbol depicted on Isis's head represents merely a graphic aid to identification, although even the Greek Isis areatologies already interpreted this symbol as identifying the throne and Isis."; McCabe, An examination of the Isis cult with preliminary exploration into New Testament studies (2008), p.103 (see link): "A possible connection with Ra could also be illustrated by the hieroglyphic name of Isis, meaning 'seat' or 'throne' (thereby demonstrating 'her association with sovereignty')."

Did Ancient Egyptians believe in an "end-time"?

Elsewhere in webspace, a commenter sparked in me a neat idea. In Ancient Egyptian there was a phrase for the beginning of time, *θāpa tapī (normally transcribed as zp tpy). The word for 'time' is *θāpa and the adjective *tapī 'foremost, beginning, head' follows the noun as in French. The adjective is built on the word *tap (tp) meaning 'head' and so it can be translated as 'first' in the sense that it precedes everything else.

When directly pondering the phrase though, I started wondering about a hidden calendrical interpretation of the adjective since Babylonian calendar terminology describes the beginning of the year as the 'head' of the year. Is it possible that Egyptians too considered creation as merely the 'head' of a cosmic age? Here then may be implied the notion of cyclical creation and destruction. This tips me off to an implied destruction prophecy lurking about. Did the Egyptians believe in an end to time in order to balance the stories of its beginning?

Geraldine Pinch in Handbook of Egyptian mythology says 'yes' on page 89: "In Book of the Dead spell 175, Atum declares that after millions of years he will destroy everything that he has made 'and the land will return into the Deep, into the Flood, as it was before (creation).'" Note that 'million' in Egyptian was *ḥaḥ (ḥḥ) and could also refer to 'an uncountable number' or 'infinity'. Remember too that Atum is the god of the setting sun, harking back to a connection between grand cosmic cycles and the daily and yearly solar cycle. It implies that, though there would be an end, a new beginning was also inevitable to the faithful Egyptian.

This additionally helps me reconcile similar Etruscan beliefs in cosmic creation, destruction and rebirth encoded in their own concept of saecula (alluded to by Roman commentators and relayed in dumbfounded confusion by modern specialists) with what appear to be this Egyptian foundation of cosmology. Answering your own silly questions sure pays off!

That Lemnian inscription again...

My philosophy is that thought is never done and conclusions are often temporary. This is how adaptive learning works. So I continue to revisit things, always looking for a better answer. That Lemnian inscription I previously talked about here and here is still weighing on my head and I just thought of another possible interpretation worth considering.

Previously, I suggested that hktaiunuśi may refer to a personal name and thus 'on behalf of Hektaion'. However I stumbled on another Greek comparison that shows promise: Ἑκάταιον 'temple or statue of Hecate'. Such a loanword would give a different value for hktaiunusi, 'on behalf of/for (-śi) the temple of Hecate (hktaiun-) ', implying that the stone base in question was bearing a statue of the goddess Hecate. Indeed, Hecate was known to be an important deity in Samothrace^[1], right next door. What a nice coincidence. So I could just shoot myself for not piecing this together before.

Keeping with my understanding of heluke as 'has slain' and assuming Suffixaufnahme, the indirect object of the action is *śurum aśil in unmarked form (ergo, a double-marked genitive śurum-s aśl-as). The phrase then must refer specifically to a sacrifice being offered up to Hecate. This might bear fruit considering Aramaic *šōr [šwr] 'ox' and the Greek sacrifices known as hecatombs.

But what then is *aśil? My Etruscan database calls up one instance of exactly this word in TLE 205 although I've been unsure whether it was simply a transliteration error for acil or not. Other Etruscanists seem likewise confused and I have no photo of it. Helmut Rix transcribes the second line as asil sacni and I notice that Paul Kretschmer had once translated it has 'holy altar'. I wonder if this is close to the mark. By giving Etruscan asil the value 'altar', asil sacni becomes 'altar (of the) sacred' and then the Lemnian inscription, Hktaiunuśi heluke śurums aślas, becomes "For the statue of Hekate an ox (or hecatomb?) for the altar has been slain."


NOTES
^[1] Rice/Stambaugh, Sources for the study of Greek religion (1979), p.161 (see link).

Etruscan temple uploaded to Google 3d Warehouse

Just to let everyone know, upon request from one commenter, I've uploaded my Etruscan temple model to Google's 3d Warehouse website to share with others online.

Click here to check it out!
As you can see by the search listing for the query "etruscan temple", I've quickly cornered the market on Etruscan 3D paraphernalia.

I have yet to add roof ornaments like statuettes which were typical of Roman and Etruscan temples and the reason for this is that while Sketchup is very intuitive and easy to use for architectural models, it's a little harder to create curvier objects. This means that I have to resort to another application like Blender to make them which must then be imported to Sketchup. Before I can do this however, I have to learn a lot more about Blender's interface which, when compared to Sketchup, is a LIVING NIGHTMARE!!! Despite that, one can accomplish some pretty impressive things with Blender so I struggle on in my sparetime learning the application bit by bit so that one day, maybe, I'll finally accomplish those roof ornaments on my temple. Hilarious stuff.

The very very very long history of Valentine's Day

I know this topic is sort of belated but then I do get a sick pleasure from being anti-fashionable. Over at Ancient Tides, Gregory LeFever talked about the history of Valentine's Day which is commonly known to be founded on the tradition of Lupercalia. As he points out, Lupercalia had come to take on a sadomasochistic flavour over time until those meddlesome Christians perverted it into something sterile and wholesome. What the blogger doesn't mention however is that this Roman festival was based in turn on Etruscan ritual and this is an interesting topic in itself that fails to be covered in much detail by historians. I find that historical gap quite sad and I hope you do too, fellow reader. So let's do something about that.

I delight in my niche knowledge that the very name of Lupercalia was undoubtedly influenced by not only the Latin word lupus 'wolf' but by the Etruscan word lupu 'passed on, dead'. If one ever wonders why the Etruscan version of Hades wears a wolf's head as a cap as pictured below, or why the wolf came to be a symbol of the dead, now you all know. In fact, if we push the connection far enough, we might ultimately thank the Etruscans for the popular sci-fi genre of werewolves today. Werewolves are in effect men whose spirits have "crossed over" through evil magic. They become "as wolves", taking on these cultural symbols of death as the embodiments of ol' Hades himself.

I can only imagine what the Etruscan term for Lupercalia was but we can at least trace this term back to Latin Lupercus, a byname of Faunus. Most Romanists, often knowing only Latin, simply take this name to mean 'He of the wolves'.

Yet, in light of the Etruscan connection, might Lupercus have been fashioned instead on Etruscan *lupver, the expected animate plural form of attested lupu? A hypothetical Etruscan name *Lupverχ would literally mean 'He of the dead'. I can only speculate that this seemingly bilingual wolf-death wordplay might have had cause to arise all the more if the Etruscan word for 'wolf' happened to be loaned from Latin, perhaps *luφ or *lupe.

It's hard to confirm any of this for certain, of course, but the speculation is still worth a ponder and being aware of the long, complex tradition of this festival adds depth to our understanding of history and our modern rituals.