Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis, the Etruscan book wrapped round a mummy

The longest surviving text in the Etruscan language was not found in Italy but in Egypt, wrapped around a mummy. It is the Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis, the 'linen book of Zagreb', now kept at the Archaeological Museum of the Croatian capital together with the body it protected for centuries. Its story is one of the most surprising in European archaeology.

From mummy to museum

Around 1848 the Croatian Mihael Barić, an official of the Hungarian royal chancellery, bought in Alexandria the mummy of a woman wrapped in linen bandages. After his death the mummy passed to his brother, who in 1867 donated it to the museum in Zagreb. It was then that closer attention revealed that some of the bandages bore lines of writing.

For years the text was thought to be Egyptian or of some other origin. In 1892 the Austrian Egyptologist Jacob Krall recognised the language as Etruscan. The bandages had been made by cutting into strips a linen book, that is, a long cloth folded like an accordion in the manner of ancient linen books, which originally had a purpose quite different from a funerary one.

A ritual calendar

The text, written in black ink and laid out in columns, contains more than a thousand legible words. It can be dated to around the third century BC, although the dating is not precise. Its content, as far as can be understood, is a calendar of religious ceremonies: it gives days of the month, the deities to whom offerings were made and formulas that recur regularly.

Ancient sources record that the Etruscans had sacred books on their religious discipline, and the Roman historian Livy mentions the libri lintei, lists of magistrates written on linen in Rome. The Liber Linteus is the only linen book of ancient Italy to have survived, and it shows concretely what such a book looked like.

Reading without understanding

The Etruscan alphabet derives from the Greek one, so the words can be pronounced with reasonable accuracy. The problem is the language: Etruscan does not belong to the Indo-European family, and the meaning of only a limited number of its words is known with certainty. The overall sense of the text, in which names of deities and verbs linked to sacrifice recur, is reconstructed by comparison with other inscriptions, but many passages remain obscure.

Nor is it known how an Etruscan sacred book ended up in Egypt. It has been suggested that it belonged to a community of Etruscan origin settled there in the Ptolemaic period, or that the linen, no longer of use, was sold for funerary wrappings. These are conjectures, none of them documented. What is certain is that reusing old cloth for bandages was a common practice in Egypt during those centuries.

The mummy and the book are displayed in the same museum. Their chance meeting, perhaps in an embalmer's workshop, saved a text that would otherwise have been lost like almost all Etruscan religious literature, which today we know mainly through the titles handed down by Latin authors. It is a rare example of how chance can preserve what history has forgotten.