A Book Cut Up to Wrap a Mummy

The Liber Linteus survives only by accident and only because it was reused. Croatian traveler Mihael Baric bought a mummy as a curiosity in Egypt in the 1840s and brought it home to Vienna and then Zagreb, where it passed to the National Museum on his death in 1859; nobody at the time recognized that the strips of linen wrapped around the body were covered in writing, let alone Etruscan writing, since Egyptian mummies were not expected to be bound in a foreign script.

Only in 1892 did the Egyptologist Jakob Krall examine the wrappings closely enough to realize they were not Egyptian hieroglyphic or hieratic text at all, and further study showed the linen had originally been a single continuous book, folded accordion style and later torn apart and reused as ordinary embalming material long after its original religious purpose had been forgotten, quite possibly by an Egyptian community that had received or purchased Etruscan cloth without understanding what was written on it.

How an Etruscan religious book ended up in Ptolemaic Egypt at all remains unexplained; the woman it wrapped, identified by an accompanying inscription as Nesi-hensu, was Egyptian, and no account survives of how her embalmers acquired specifically Etruscan linen for her wrappings rather than any of the plain cloth that was the ordinary and far more available choice.