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."