When an unexplained ancient language was discovered on the bandages of a mummy’s wrappings in the 1800s, Egyptologists were perplexed. It took decades to solve, but it rewarded researchers with an important insight into the Etruscan writers.
The Museum of Zagreb in Croatia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, received a female Egyptian mummy in 1868. Her previous owner removed her packaging but retained it. She had been a commoner, not a member of royalty or the priestly caste. However, her wrappings included an intriguing conundrum. The writing on the linen strips was not Egyptian hieroglyphics, as noticed by the German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch. It was a script he was unaware of.
Two decades later, in 1891, museum officials decided to transfer the wrappings to Vienna in an effort to decipher the inscriptions. Jakob Krall, an Austrian Egyptologist, inspected the bandages and was ultimately able to crack the code. The letters were not Coptic, as some had hypothesized, but rather Etruscan, the language of the pre-Roman society that governed Italy. Whoever covered the tomb all those years ago tore pieces out of an Etruscan book of linen.
The discovery was extraordinary. Numerous classical works contain references to Etruscan linen books, but surviving examples have been hard to locate. Egypt’s arid climate, combined with the desiccants used to dry the mummies, created ideal conditions for preserving the delicate fabric. The wrappings of the mummy were not only the earliest entire linen Etruscan writing discovered, but also the longest Etruscan text ever discovered. It might be a treasure trove of knowledge about the culture.
The identification of the Linen Book of Zagreb (also known by its Latin name, Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis) by Krall prompted several doubts regarding its contents and date of composition. How an Etruscan book came to cover an Egyptian mummy was of equal curiosity.
The Unsolved Mysteries of Etruria
The ancient Etruscans originally hailed from an area roughly corresponding to the contemporary Italian province of Tuscany. In the ninth century B.C., Etruria emerged as a trading power that also produced exquisite works of art in metalworking, painting, and carving for the benefit of Greek colonists. Goods from Etruria, Greek deities, and the Euboean Greek alphabet all made their way to the area via trade. It was reworked by the Etruscans into their own, right-to-left writing.
Compared to other European languages, Etruscan is remarkably unique. The Indo-European languages that came to Europe thousands of years ago are the ancestors of nearly all of the languages spoken there today, English included. However, Etruscan, as an exception, stands as an exception: a language that not only predates but also survives the Indo-European invasion.
The Etruscans, the oldest rulers of Rome, left their mark on the city’s history. The Etruscan word phersu, meaning “mask,” is the origin of the Latin words “persona” and “person.” But as republican Rome grew stronger, it absorbed Etruscan culture, leaving only relics, colorful tomb art, and inscriptions that became harder and harder for the general public to read.
Claudius, the Roman emperor in the first century AD, was one of the last classical-era persons to study and master Etruscan. Claudius wrote a 20-volume history of the Etruscans, but unfortunately, it has been lost to history.
Evidence compiled
The Linen Book of Zagreb was once a sheet measuring around 11 feet in length and including 12 columns of writing before it was torn into bandages. It is estimated that the 1,330 words retrieved from the bandages represent almost 60% of the original text. When Krall figured out the language of the linen book in 1891, it greatly increased the amount of text that could be used to study the ancient Etruscan language. Before that, only about 10,000 short inscriptions had been studied.
Initially, academics assumed the linen book was a funeral artifact, leading them to wonder if it was connected to the corpse it had covered. The Croatian man, Mihail Baric, bought the mummy in the 1840s from Alexandria. His residence in Vienna, where he kept the mummy, was a secret. Once he passed away, his family gave the mummy and its wrappings to a museum in Zagreb.
The mummy’s wrappings included not only the Etruscan linen book but also several other texts. Additionally, a papyrus copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead was utilized as part of the wrappings. Experts now assume that the lady whose body was mummified is the one mentioned in this Egyptian text, a woman known as Nesi-Khons (“the mistress of the home”). It was determined in the late 20th century that she was born between the 4th and 1st centuries B.C. and passed away when she was in her 30s.
Titles and rubrics in the book’s red pages were written with cinnabar, a scarlet mineral used to make paints. The black ink was manufactured from burnt ivory. The balsam used in the mummification process obscured much of the Etruscan text, but in the 1930s, advances in infrared photography allowed 90 more lines of the Etruscan to be deciphered, providing further evidence that the book served as a ritual calendar documenting rites carried out at various times of the year, as previously believed by scholars.
The Etruscan text provides guidance on how and when to offer homage to various deities, including suggestions for libations and animal sacrifices. Nethuns, an Etruscan water deity, is mentioned; he is linked to Neptune, the Roman sea god. The Etruscan sun deity Usil is mentioned, as he is comparable to the Greek sun god Helios.
Words and place names were discovered via additional research that directly related to the origin of the material. The linen book was likely produced in the area around the contemporary Italian city of Perugia, according to Etruscan specialists. Although the linen was dated to the fourth century B.C., the literary evidence indicates that the writing was created considerably later. The inclusion of January 1 as the beginning of the ceremonial year is the most convincing evidence that the book was composed between 200 and 150 B.C. If this later date for the passage is correct, it gives a glimpse into a way of life that would soon be wiped out by the spread of Roman power.
A Yearly Ceremony
How this Etruscan writing came to be in Egypt is a mystery that has baffled scholars for a long time. Some possible explanations have been proposed. The mummy was acquired in the city of Alexandria in the 19th century, and this is significant for a number of reasons. Because she lived in a port city, it is likely that books from different civilizations were readily available there, and thus her body was likely mummified using whatever materials were at hand. The key premise of this idea is that the book in question had no special significance in the eyes of the recently deceased woman. All that was available to the mummifiers was utilised.
An opposing notion suggests that linen books were also interred with the dead in Etruscan tombs, much like the Egyptian Book of the Dead. If the dead woman was of Etruscan descent, her family might have buried her with both the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Etruscan linen text, which is how both of these cultures do things.
