Etruscans: Sheep-Liver Diviners, the Cloaca Maxima and a Mummy's Linen Book

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The Etruscans called themselves the Rasenna, while Greeks called them Tyrrhenian pirates, in one myth turned into dolphins by Dionysus, and Romans called them Tusci, possibly from a word for tower. They dominated central Italy from roughly the ninth to the first century BC, building fortified towns on plateaus of volcanic tuff. Herodotus claimed they were Lydian refugees led by Tyrrhenus, but Dionysius of Halicarnassus argued they were native, and modern DNA and the unbroken Villanovan record support him. Twelve independent city-states, including Tarquinia, Veii and Cerveteri, formed the Dodecapolis and met yearly at the Fanum Voltumnae, where priest-kings settled disputes through haruspicy, reading the livers of sacrificed sheep.

Rich in copper and iron, they traded metal and wine to the Celts, Greeks and Phoenicians, and buried their elite in painted rock-cut tombs. Etruscan women attended games and dined beside their husbands, which Greek and Roman writers smeared as promiscuity. Etruscan engineers built the Cloaca Maxima beneath early Rome, and the Tarquin kings brought the fasces, the arch and gladiatorial games. Allied with Carthage at Alalia around 540 BC, they lost at sea at Cumae in 474 BC as Gauls took the Po Valley, and Rome took the cities one by one, granting citizenship by 90 BC. Their isolate language survives in over 13,000 short inscriptions and the Liber Linteus, a linen ritual book cut into strips to wrap an Egyptian mummy.

• The bronze Liver of Piacenza maps zones of a sheep's liver to specific gods.
• Some tombs trace the dead person's descent through both the father's and the mother's line.
• Embracing couples on sarcophagi were believed to ward off evil in the afterlife.
• Rome's Senate kept calling on Etruscan haruspices to read livers in times of crisis for centuries.
• Linguists can pronounce Etruscan from its Greek-derived alphabet but lack a long bilingual text to translate it.