The Etruscans were remembered by Roman writers as the most religious of peoples, meaning the most preoccupied with method. What they possessed was a disciplina, a body of technique for establishing divine intention, transmitted in books that Cicero and others describe and that do not survive: books on the reading of entrails, books on lightning, and books on the founding of cities, the division of land and the ordering of time.
Nancy de Grummond and Erika Simon's survey sets out what can be recovered. The bronze model liver found near Piacenza is the key object, its surface divided into regions each inscribed with a god's name, so that the position of a mark on a sacrificial animal's liver could be referred to a specific power. The same logic governed lightning. The sky was divided into sixteen parts, and the part a bolt came from determined which god had sent it and what the sign meant.
The pantheon includes Tin or Tinia, Uni and Menrva, a triad the Romans received as Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, alongside figures with no Roman equivalent such as the fate goddess Vanth and the demon Charun with his hammer, both of whom appear in tomb painting. Roman religion took the haruspices themselves, who were still being consulted by the state centuries after Etruria had been absorbed into it.