Etruscans

← Encyclopedia

The Etruscans were the people of Etruria, the region of central Italy between the Arno and the Tiber that overlaps roughly with modern Tuscany. Their city-states flourished from about the eighth century BCE, reached their height in the sixth, and were gradually absorbed into the expanding Roman state over the following centuries, so that by the early Common Era Etruria was Roman and the Etruscan language had fallen out of use. What survives of them is largely material — painted tombs, bronze mirrors, inscriptions — and a reputation, fixed by Greek and Roman writers, as the most religious of peoples.

That reputation rests on the Etrusca disciplina: a body of religious knowledge the Etruscans held to be revealed, not reasoned out. It covered above all the reading of signs. The best known of its branches was haruspicy, the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, and especially of the liver, whose surface was divided into regions answering to particular gods; a bronze model of a sheep’s liver found near Piacenza, marked off into named compartments, is usually read as a practitioner’s guide to that scheme. Alongside it stood augury, the interpretation of the flight and cries of birds, and a developed lore of lightning, in which the quarter of the sky a bolt came from and the place it struck carried distinct meaning. The discipline assumed an orderly cosmos in which the gods continually signalled their will, and a trained priesthood — the haruspices — who knew how to read what was shown.

Rome took this seriously. Roman magistrates consulted Etruscan haruspices on prodigies and disasters for centuries, the emperor Claudius is said to have tried to preserve the order as it declined, and Roman writers such as the elder Pliny and the antiquarian tradition behind them treated the discipline as a genuine and ancient science. Much of what is known of Etruscan religion in fact comes through these later Roman reports rather than from Etruscan texts read directly, since the language is non-Indo-European and still only partly understood; the longer religious texts that would settle many questions have not survived.

Scholarship has long set the liver-reading of the haruspices beside the older hepatoscopy of Mesopotamia, where the inspection of sheep livers was an established temple science. The resemblance is striking, and a line of transmission westward across the ancient Mediterranean has often been proposed; whether the Etruscan practice descends from a Near Eastern model, or arose in parallel from a shared assumption that the gods write their intentions on the body of the victim, remains genuinely open. The Etruscans left behind no system one can reconstruct whole. What they left was a conviction, inherited intact by Rome, that the future was legible to those taught how to look.

→ Related: Divination · Mesopotamia