The Liver of Piacenza, a bronze map of the Etruscan sky
Found in 1877 at Settima di Gossolengo, the bronze Liver of Piacenza bears the names of Etruscan gods arranged in compartments. Here is how to read it.
In September 1877, in the fields of Settima, a hamlet of Gossolengo not far from Piacenza, a farmer ploughing the land unearthed a small bronze object of unusual shape. Only later was it understood to be the model of a sheep's liver covered with Etruscan inscriptions. Today it is kept in the Civic Museums of Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza and is considered one of the most important documents for our knowledge of Etruscan religion.
A small and dense object
The liver is a little over twelve centimetres long and fits comfortably in one hand. Its upper surface reproduces the anatomy of the organ with some fidelity: one can recognise the gall bladder and the protrusions that the ancients observed when examining entrails. Lines are drawn across this surface, dividing it into compartments, each bearing the abbreviated name of a deity. The outer rim has sixteen of them, while the inner area holds another twenty-four.
The most widely accepted dating places the object between the second and first centuries BC, at a time when Etruria had already been absorbed into the Roman world. We do not know for certain what it was used for: it may have been a teaching tool for young haruspices, an aid for ritual use or a votive offering. The find-spot, in the Po valley, shows in any case how widely the discipline had spread, even far from the centres of Tyrrhenian Etruria.
The gods in the compartments
Among the legible names are well-known figures of the Etruscan pantheon. Tin, the supreme god corresponding to Jupiter, appears in several compartments; beside him we read Uni, the equivalent of Juno, Fufluns, a deity close to Dionysus, Selvans, protector of woods and boundaries, and Neθ, short for Nethuns, the god of waters. On the underside, divided into two halves, we read instead Usils, the sun, and Tivr, the moon.
The arrangement of the names is not random. Scholars have noted that the sixteen compartments on the rim correspond to the sixteen regions into which, according to Pliny the Elder, the Etruscans divided the sky. A similar division of the heavens, populated by deities, appears many centuries later in the work of Martianus Capella, the late antique author of The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, who probably drew on learned sources of Etruscan tradition.
The sky reflected in the entrails
The idea underlying the Liver of Piacenza is that the organ of the sacrificed animal reflects, in miniature, the order of the cosmos. Each zone of the liver corresponds to a region of the sky and to the deity who dwells there. An anomaly at a precise point indicated which god was sending a signal and with what intention. The haruspex therefore read the liver as an oriented map, in which what lay below mirrored what lay above.
Clay liver models used for teaching divination are also known from Mesopotamia, for example at Mari and Babylon, many centuries earlier. The comparison suggests ancient contacts between the Near East and Etruria, although the ways in which this knowledge was transmitted remain a matter of debate among specialists and cannot be reconstructed with certainty.
The Liver of Piacenza is an object that fits in one hand, yet it sums up an entire view of the world. In it the body of the animal, the vault of heaven and the divine hierarchy coincide. For the historian it is a precious key to Etruscan theology; for today's visitor it remains a fascinating image of how the ancients sought the order of the universe within the nearest and most concrete things.