The Liber Linteus of Zagreb, the only surviving Etruscan sacred book
A linen book written in Etruscan and cut into strips to wrap an Egyptian mummy: the history and content of the Liber Linteus preserved in Zagreb.
Almost nothing has survived of the Etruscan sacred books described by Latin authors. There is, however, one extraordinary exception, which has reached us through a series of almost novelistic circumstances. It is the Liber Linteus, a linen book written in the Etruscan language and kept in the Archaeological Museum of Zagreb. With more than a thousand legible words, it is the longest known Etruscan text and the only Etruscan linen book to have survived.
From an Egyptian tomb to the museum
In 1848 Mihael Barić, a Croatian official in the service of the Hungarian administration, bought a female mummy in Alexandria, Egypt. He kept it in his home in Vienna and, after his death, the mummy passed to the museum in Zagreb. The wrappings around the body bore lines of writing, but for several decades nobody managed to identify the language, and various oriental scripts were suggested.
Only at the end of the nineteenth century did the Austrian Egyptologist Jakob Krall recognise that the script was Etruscan. It was then understood that the linen had originally been a book written in columns, and that in Egypt it had been cut into strips and reused for mummification. How an Etruscan book reached Egypt remains a mystery: perhaps it belonged to a community of Etruscan emigrants, perhaps it arrived through trade.
A calendar of rites
The text is usually dated to the third century BC, although some scholars place it a little later. Despite the difficulties of the Etruscan language, its content is at least partly understandable. It is a ritual calendar: the text gives precise dates, names of deities and formulas that seem to describe offerings and ceremonies to be performed on particular days and in particular places.
It contains the names of gods also known from other sources, such as Nethuns, and terms that recur in other Etruscan religious texts. Its repetitive structure, with formulas that return with small variations, recalls that of the ritual texts of other peoples of ancient Italy, such as the Iguvine Tables, written in the Umbrian language. For this reason the Liber Linteus is often associated with the libri rituales mentioned by Latin sources.
Other ritual texts
The Liber Linteus is not the only document of its kind. The Capua Tile, a terracotta slab of the fifth century BC discovered in 1898 at Santa Maria Capua Vetere and now kept in Berlin, also contains a calendar of ceremonies, arranged by months. It is the second longest Etruscan text and confirms that sacred calendars were an important part of Etruscan religious literature.
Together, the two documents offer a direct view of Etruscan religion, without the mediation of Greek and Roman authors, who often described it with curiosity but also with prejudice. Their study proceeds slowly, because Etruscan, although written in an alphabet that can be read without difficulty, remains a language that is only partly understood.
The Liber Linteus reminds us that the Etruscans truly were a people of the sacred book. Their doctrines did not live only in the memory of priests but were committed to writing and regulated with almost notarial precision. That the only surviving book was saved thanks to an Egyptian funerary custom is one of the strangest coincidences in the history of archaeology.