The Umbrians

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In 1444 a farmer turning a field near Scheggia, in the high country below the Apennine pass, struck a cache of bronze. Seven tablets came up out of the ground, some whole and some broken, their faces crowded with letters in a script that no one then living could read. They were carried down to the nearby town of Gubbio, which bought them in 1456 and has kept them ever since. Only slowly did it become clear what had been found: the written liturgy of a priesthood, set down in the language of the people who had once held the town, and through it the fullest account of how any people of ancient Italy worshiped its gods.

A people of the Apennine heart

The Umbrians were an Italic people of inner central Italy, settled in the upland country roughly between the middle course of the Tiber and the spine of the central Apennines — east of Etruria, with the river between them and the Etruscan cities, in the region that to this day carries their name. The Roman writers reckoned them among the oldest peoples of the peninsula. Pliny the Elder, gathering the lore of Italy in his Natural History, set down the tradition that the Umbrian people were thought the most ancient in Italy and held that they had survived the great deluge — a folk etymology that bound their name to the rains, Ombrii, those who outlasted the flood. The claim is a Roman one, made at a distance of centuries, and it tells more about how Rome regarded the Umbrians than about any datable origin; but it places them, in the Roman imagination, near the beginning of things.

On the ground they were a people of the high towns. Where the Etruscans built a dense urban civilization in the river valleys and the coastal plain, the Umbrians lived for the most part in smaller settlements perched on defensible hilltops — places occupied, by the archaeological record, from the ninth century BCE onward, scattered across the mountains and the upland basins. Their towns bore names that have come down the centuries: Iguvium, which is Gubbio; Ameria, which is Amelia; Tuder, which is Todi; Spoletium, Camerinum, Sentinum, and others strung along the valleys and the passes. They were not, in the early period, a single state but a constellation of communities, each with its own cults and its own quarrels, bound by a shared tongue and a shared sense of being an old people of the mountains.

That tongue was Umbrian, one of the Italic languages, belonging to the Osco-Umbrian branch — the Sabellic group — rather than to the Latino-Faliscan branch that held Latin. Umbrian was thus kin to the Oscan spoken across the southern Apennines and a cousin, more distant, to Latin: close enough that a Roman of the Republic could half-follow it, far enough that the two were plainly different speeches. The Umbrians wrote their language in two hands across the span of their literacy. The older was a native alphabet adapted, like the alphabets of their Etruscan neighbors and of most of Italy, from the letters the Etruscans had themselves carried inland from the Greek colonies of the coast; the later was the Latin alphabet, taken up as Rome’s reach and Rome’s letters spread through the peninsula. The shift from the one script to the other can be watched in the bronze tablets of Iguvium themselves, where the earlier text stands in native letters and the later text in Latin ones — a people changing its hand in the act of keeping its rites.

The religion in bronze

What raises the Umbrians above the level of one more Italic people among many is that, almost alone among them, they left a record of their religion in their own words. The seven tablets of Iguvium — the Iguvine Tables, the Tabulae Iguvinae, also called the Eugubine Tablets — are bronze sheets inscribed across perhaps three centuries, the earliest assigned by most scholars to about the third century BCE and the latest to the first, with the script changing partway through from the native Umbrian alphabet to the Latin one. They are not a treatise or a chronicle. They are working documents: the proceedings and the liturgy of a brotherhood of priests, set down so that the rites might be performed correctly, in the right order, with the right words, year after year. As the Oxford and Britannica notices observe, they give the fullest surviving record of any of the Italic religions, and the longest and most important single document of the whole Osco-Umbrian group of languages.

Side A of the first Iguvine Table, inscribed in the native Umbrian alphabet (third to first centuries BCE). Photographic reproduction by IRDAU, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The priesthood whose rites the tablets preserve was the brotherhood of the Atiedian Brethren — the fratres Atiedii, in Umbrian the frater Atiieřiur — a college of twelve who served the cults of Iguvium and carried, alongside their sacred office, real responsibilities in the life of the town. Roman observers, looking back, found them not unlike the Arval Brethren of Rome, the priestly college that sang over the fields; and the religious order the tablets describe, with its high triad and its archaic forms, resembles the early stratum of Roman religion closely enough that the two have been studied side by side ever since the tablets were read. The Brethren were not freelance ritualists. They were officers of a community, charged with keeping it whole.

The central act they kept was the lustration — the solemn purification of the town and its people. The tablets lay out, in exact and repeated detail, the lustration of the citadel, the ocre or sacred mount, and the lustration of the gathered people of Iguvium. The rite moved about the bounds: a procession encircling the place to be purified, sacrifices offered at the gates of the town, prayers spoken to the gods at each station. Before any of it could begin, the auspices had to be taken. The tablets prescribe the watching of birds — their flight and their cry observed from a fixed station, the favorable signs distinguished from the unfavorable — and the rite could go forward only when the birds had been seen aright. The Umbrian text names the kinds of birds to be watched and the quarters of the sky from which a sign was sought; the augury was not an ornament but a gate, the condition on which the gods’ consent was read before the people were led around their walls. This is set down here as the tablets set it down — a description of what was done and in what order, not a manual by which it could be done again. The wording of the prayers, the species of the victims, the placing of the salted meal and the wine, the words by which an enemy people might be ritually expelled and excluded from the town: all of it is there, recorded so that the Brethren of one year might do exactly as the Brethren before them had done.

The gods to whom the great prayers of the lustration were addressed stood in a triad — the highest group of the Iguvine pantheon, each member sharing a single cult-title, Grabovius. The three were Jupiter Grabovius, in Umbrian Iuve Krapuvi; Mars Grabovius, Marte Krapuvi; and a third god, Vofionus Grabovius, Vufiune Krapuvi, who has no familiar name outside this Umbrian world. To these three the tablets direct the central sacrifices of the rite — three oxen, offered before the three gates of the town, one god to each gate. The meaning of the shared title Grabovius is uncertain; it has been connected by some scholars to an oak or to the idea of a god of the holm-oak, but the reading is debated and best left open. What is plain is the shape: a sovereign sky-god, a god of war and the bounds, and a third who completes the company. In the Roman reckoning the first two answer readily to Jupiter and to Mars, and the triad as a whole has long been set beside the archaic Roman triad of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus. The third Umbrian god, Vofionus, is the one whose nature is most argued: he has been compared to Quirinus, the Roman god of the assembled citizen-body, and alternatively to Liber, on the strength of a possible root meaning “the people.” The comparison is a comparison, a way of placing an Umbrian god by a Roman one whose contours are better known; it is not an identity, and the Umbrian god keeps his own name and his own obscurity.

An Iguvine bronze tablet, third to second century BCE, in the civic museum at Gubbio. Geo Sergio Fotografo, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Around the high triad the tablets name a wider company of powers — gods of the gates and of particular places, deities invoked in the lesser rites, recipients of the smaller offerings that hedged the great ones. The text is dense with cult-terms whose exact sense is still worked over by those who study it: names of vessels and of portions of the victim, of stations and of motions, of the things to be carried and the words to be said. Much of this learning is hard-won and provisional. Where the language is uncertain the honest course is to say so, and a good deal of the detailed sense of the Iguvine liturgy remains genuinely uncertain, recovered word by word from a single set of bronze sheets with no second text to check it against. But the frame is firm, and the frame is extraordinary: a complete civic liturgy, the worship of a town set down by the town’s own priests, in the town’s own speech.

The contrast of the source

It is worth marking what kind of evidence this is, because it is rare. The religion of the Etruscans, who were the Umbrians’ neighbors across the Tiber and in many ways the dominant sacred culture of the region, survives almost entirely at second hand — through their painted tombs and engraved bronze mirrors, through gold and bronze inscriptions, and through the later Roman authors who inherited and codified the Etruscan divinatory science. The Etruscans left no surviving literature of their own that explains their rites; what they meant by their omens and their lightning-lore comes to us mostly refracted through Roman eyes, at the Romans’ distance and in the Romans’ interest. The Umbrians of Iguvium did something different. They wrote down their own liturgy, in their own hand, for their own use — not a description of the rite by an outsider but the rite’s own working text. The same is true, in their different ways, of the Faliscans in their inscriptions and the Veneti in the votive offerings of their writing-goddess at Este. Among the peoples of ancient Italy whose religions can be glimpsed at all, the Umbrians of Gubbio left the widest window and the steadiest, because they wrote it themselves.

Rome, and after

The Umbrians’ political history runs, like that of all their neighbors, toward Rome. Roman power reached up into Umbria in the decades around 300 BCE. The Umbrians appear among the coalition that Rome broke at the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BCE — fought, fittingly, on Umbrian ground, where Rome confronted for the first time a grand alliance of Samnites, Etruscans, Umbrians, and Senone Gauls and, in a hard day’s fighting, defeated it. The victory broke the coalition; the Etruscans, the Umbrians, and the Gauls fell away from the war, and the road lay open to the subjection of central Italy. By about 260 BCE Umbria was under full Roman control, its towns bound to Rome by treaty and by colony, the Latin-letter fortress of Narnia planted on the site of a conquered Umbrian town to hold the country.

The Umbrian towns kept their cults and their tongue for a while under Roman dominion, and it is in just this twilight that the later Iguvine tablets were inscribed — the rites of the old gods recorded now in the conqueror’s alphabet, a people keeping faith with its liturgy even as the larger world that produced it passed away. After the Social War the Umbrians, like the other Italian peoples, were enrolled as Roman citizens, in 90 BCE. With citizenship and the steady spread of Latin, the Umbrian language lost its ground; it gave way to the Latin of the towns and the roads and the law, until at last it was no longer spoken and the script of the older tablets became unreadable. That is why, when the bronze came up out of the field in 1444, no one could say what it was.

The recovery of the Umbrians has been, in large part, the recovery of those seven tablets. From the sixteenth century onward they drew the attention of antiquarians; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they became the central document of Italic religion and the chief monument of the Umbrian language, edited and re-edited, their liturgy reconstructed and their cult-terms argued over by generations of scholars who came to Gubbio to read the bronze in the civic museum of the Palazzo dei Consoli, where the tablets are kept. They have been called Umbria’s Rosetta Stone, and the comparison is apt in one sense: they are the key by which a lost speech and a lost religion are read. But the better measure of them is simpler. No other people of ancient Italy set down so full an account of how it worshiped — the bounds it walked, the birds it watched, the gates at which it gave its oxen, the gods it named and the order in which it named them. Through the bronze of Iguvium, the worship of one Apennine town survives entire, in the words of the priests who performed it; and through it, more than through any other single thing, the Umbrians are not merely a name in a Roman list of old peoples but a community whose sacred life can still be followed, step by careful step, around its walls.

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