The Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis, the linen book of Zagreb, is the longest surviving Etruscan text, 230 lines across twelve columns of linen cloth that were later cut into strips and used to wrap an Egyptian mummy, in whose bindings the text lay unrecognized for nearly two thousand years. The passages that can be read appear to form a religious ritual calendar naming specific rites for specific deities on specific days, though the great majority of the text remains untranslated because Etruscan itself is still only partially understood.
Facts
Origins
Era of CompositionPaleographic analysis of the script dates the writing itself to around 250 BCE, while radiocarbon testing of the mummy the linen was later reused to wrap points to a burial around 390 BCE, a gap explained by the linen having been kept and written on well before its eventual reuse as wrapping. 1 Origin of the NameIts name, Latin for linen book, describes the physical object rather than a title the text gave itself, strips of an Egyptian mummy wrapping made from a repurposed Etruscan linen book, its actual content and original title now lost. 1 Attributed Author / CompilerAnonymous; a ritual calendar text with no attributed author in any tradition. 1 Text
Literary Form Scholarship and Forensics
Decipherment StatusEtruscan is only partially deciphered; the text is read as a ritual calendar from recurring formulae and known vocabulary, not translated in full. An attested state of Etruscology generally, not a text-specific open question. 1 Scholarly NoteAs the longest surviving continuous Etruscan text, at around 1,200 words, it remains central to Etruscan linguistics despite the language's only partial decipherment, since its ritual calendar formulae repeat often enough to let philologists identify recurring grammatical patterns even where individual word meanings stay uncertain. 1 Scholarship
First PublishedThe Etruscan language of the text was first correctly identified in 1891 by the scholar Jacob Krall, decades after the wrapped mummy had been acquired in Egypt in 1848 and long after earlier observers had wrongly assumed the linen carried Egyptian hieroglyphic or hieratic text. 1 Transmission
Manuscript TraditionSurvives only as this single mummy wrapping, cut into strips for burial use centuries after the linen book itself was written, so it is known through one physical witness that no other Etruscan textual source can corroborate. 1 Learn More
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.
What Can Be Read of a Language Half Understood
At 230 lines across twelve columns and roughly twelve hundred distinct word forms, the Liber Linteus is by a wide margin the longest connected Etruscan text ever recovered, dwarfing the brief funerary and dedicatory inscriptions that make up nearly all of the rest of the surviving Etruscan corpus. Etruscan itself is not related to any other known language family, has no surviving bilingual text long enough to serve as a full key, the way the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian, and remains understood only partially, chiefly through internal comparison of recurring formulae, a handful of religious and calendrical loanwords borrowed into Latin, and short bilingual funerary texts.
What scholars can extract from the Liber Linteus rests on exactly this partial understanding: the text repeats groups of words at regular intervals in patterns that closely resemble a calendar, naming specific gods, among them recognizably Etruscan deities, alongside verbs plausibly meaning to offer or to sacrifice and words for specific months or festival days, leading most specialists to read the whole as a ritual calendar prescribing particular rites for particular deities on particular recurring dates, quite possibly tied to Etruscan haruspicy and the disciplina etrusca, the divinatory science the Romans themselves later borrowed from Etruscan priests. The great majority of the text, however, remains genuinely untranslated rather than merely awaiting a more patient reader, since Etruscan grammar and vocabulary outside a fairly narrow known set simply are not yet recovered well enough to support a full translation, a limitation that is a fact about the state of Etruscan studies rather than about this text in particular.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The Liber Linteus is associated with Etruscan Religion, its own tradition field, as the longest surviving Etruscan text.
Attests
The offering address is preserved within the Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis, the longest surviving Etruscan text.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.