Parrot Time Magazine

The Thinking of Speaking
Issue #6 November / December 2013
Artifacts
Liber Linteus

Liber Linteus

Mummified Language

Mummified Language

by Lucille Martin
November / December 2013 |  asd

Ancient artifacts are usually made of something durable, like stone, clay or preserved wood, to help them survive the centuries. One, however, is made of cloth, and is actually a book. The Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis (Latin for Linen Book of Zagreb) is the only book made of linen in existence. It is largely untranslated because it is written in the Etruscan language, which itself is largely unknown, and is the longest text of Etruscan.

What makes the Liber Linteus even more unique is the way it was preserved. It was discovered as bandages, wrapped around an Egyptian mummy. The original book had been torn into strips and used to bind the body. This is one of those times in which the items of a mummy are the more valuable finds.

Etruscan

The significance of the Liber Linteus being written in Etruscan is that so little remains of the language today. It was spoken and written in the Etruscan civilization that existed in what is modern day Italy in a time before the Roman Empire. It was the rise of the Romans and their language, Latin, that replaced the Etruscan people and language.

Originally, Etruscan was widespread over much of the Mediterranean. This can be seen by the thousands of short inscriptions found on so much of the regions, dating back to 700 BC. Beyond Italy, Etruscan inscriptions have been found in the Balkans, Africa, Corsica, Elba, Gallia Narbonensis, Greece and the Black Sea.

A few Romans were known to be able to read Etruscan, the last one being the Roman emperor Claudius. He was the author of an extensive twenty volume writing on them. Latin authors wrote about how rich the Etruscan literature was, however, the Liber Linteus is the only book that has survived the ages.

Even if more text of it existed, Etruscan would still be difficult to analyze because it is a language isolate. No other language resembling it has been found in Europe or anywhere else. Even the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus recognized this, describing it as a language that was unlike any other.

Some aspects of Etruscan remain as part of Latin. A few dozen Etruscan words and names were borrowed by the Romans, and some of those survive today in modern languages.

One significant contribution Etruscan had was the Latin alphabet. The Etruscan alphabet was adapted for Latin and used 26 letters.

Purchase


The Zagreb mummy on display, without wrappings

How the mummy and wrappings were first found goes back to 1848. Mihajlo Barić was a secretary in the Austro-Hungarian Royal Chancellery who resigned from his post and took off on a tour of several countries. While in Alexandria, Egypt, he found the opportunity to purchase a sarcophagus containing a small mummy as a souvenir. It is unclear who the sellers were, but they were likely to be grave robbers or antique traders in Alexandria. He had it shipped to his home in Vienna, where he put it on display in a glass cabinet in the corner of his sitting room. The mummy was presented upright, held in place by an iron rod. Barić's home had other oddities and art collections he had acquired, so it was right at home.

During most of the time it was there, the mummy was still wrapped, except for its head, which Barić had revealed, perhaps for shock value. It is said that he would show it to guests in his house and claim it was the embalmed corpse of King Stephen of Hungary. He doesn't seem to have noticed the writing on the wrappings, at least not at first, since the writing was on the inside of the linen. Later, he had the wrappings completely removed and put on display in another glass case.

It was in this way that both mummy and wrappings remained until Barić's death in 1859. It was then that his brother Ilija, a priest in Slavonia, became executor of Barić's will. Having no interest himself in the mummy, Ilija donated it and the wrappings to the then State Institute of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalamtia in Zagreb, now the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb.

Examinations

Upon arriving at the Institute, the mummy and wrappings were put under the supervision of Sabljar, and he was the first to catalogue them. Sime Ljubic replaced him in 1871, becoming the curator of the Museum. Ljubic was the first professionally educated classical archaeologist of this institution and it was his idea to put the Egypt collection in order.

Ljubic invited German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch to examine the remains. Brugsch was the first who noticed the text, but believed it to be Egyptian hieroglyphs, so he paid it little more attention.

It is said that he would show it to guests in his house and claim it was the embalmed corpse of King Stephen of Hungary.

The second expert to examine the writings was the English world traveler Richard Burton, who was also a friend and donator to the Institute. He and Brugsch discussed them in 1877 and realized that the writing was not Egyptian. They recognized the possible importance of the finding and believed that they were, perhaps, even a transliteration of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in Arabic.

After realizing that was not the case, Burton had the idea that the script of the bandages was runic and published his ideas in the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom in London in 1879. This was the first time the Liber Linteus was presented as an academic prospect to the rest of the scientists of the world.


The Liber Linteus on display

The wrappings were sent to Vienna in 1891 to be examined more thoroughly by Coptic language expert Jacob Krall. He expected the writing to be Coptic (Egyptian written in Greek letters), Carian (an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family) , or Libyan (the version of Arabic used in Libya), but found them to be Etruscan. He was the first to realize this, and he reassembled the strips into the proper order, although he was not able to translate them completely. This work shows that the linen wrappings were part of a large manuscript. Not only was it Etruscan, but it was the longest ever preserved inscription in this language. Krall published his findings as Die etruskischen Mumienbinden des Agramer National Museums (The Etruscan mummy wrappings of the Agramer National Museum) in Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Sciences) in 1892. It remains to this day a significant study of both the wrappings and the Etruscan language.

After this work was published, the wrappings were orthocromatically photographed (using light without a red spectrum) by Josef Eder, who was an Austrian specializing in the chemistry of photography. The results were much better than a previous attempt in 1870 by Croatian photographer Ivan Standl, with the text being captured well on film. Other experts of the time contributed to the study. Julius von Wiesner, a Professor of Botany at the University of Vienna, performed a chemical analysis of the wrappings and ink on them. The hairs of the mummy were examined by Austrian anatomist and histologist Victor von Ebner.

This scrutiny spawned many books, with some having very serious scientific outlooks while others were more science fiction. Many scientists traveled to see the articles for themselves. One of these was Gustav Herbig, a German linguist and Estruscologist (one who studies Etruscian). While working with the wrappings to restore them in 1911, he found a new fragment of wrapping with writing on it amid the unwritten bandages. This piece was sent to Dr. Rudolph Robert at the Institute of Chemistry, Pharmacology and Physiology. There, it was discovered that the wrappings were saturated with balm resin and a harmful iron oxide, which would have to be removed.

Little more progress was made with the wrappings until in 1932, when the first attempts were made on it to photograph it using the infrared spectrum, in an attempt to recover the parts that had become unreadable. This worked quite well, and in 1934, a series of photographs were made of 90 of the lines, making them much easier to read. The Liber Linteus was kept in a safe for storage during World War II. After that, they were returned to the Zagreb Archaeological Museum in Croatia. Today, the mummy is on exhibit, but the Liber Linteus itself is kept in a safe to help preserve it.

Construction


The final resting place of the Liber Linteus: the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb

The Liber Linteus is not simply a long scroll of continuous writing. When all of the known pieces are lined up, it resembles a book that has all its pages removed and set flat, one after the other. There are twelve of these pages, or columns, reading from right to left. Much of the first part is missing, but the text is almost complete near the end. The book ends with the last page being blank, but the ends of the wrappings are in tact, showing it is the actual end of the writing. In use, the Liber Linteus would have been folded back and forth along the column breaks, like an accordion, making each page be two of the columns, back to back.

The columns are divided into a total of 230 lines and contain 1200 legible words. The ink of the writing is actually in two colours, with black being used for the letters and red being used for the diacritics and lines dividing the text. A red horizontal line is used to mark the beginning of a paragraph. When it was used to wrap the mummy, the Liber Litneus was torn into 5 strips, or binds, most being around 300cms in length. These binds ripped horizontally, across the entire length. Bound up as a book, it would have been roughly 40-44cm tall, 30cm wide, and 12cm thick.

Not only was it Etruscan, but it was the longest ever preserved inscription in this language.

While the age of the Liber Linteus is unknown, experts have compared the shape and styles of the characters in the text to other Etruscan artifacts. While the actual date is still debated, with possible times being somewhere between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, the best estimate is probably around 250 BC. They further conclude it was produced when the Etruscan language was still largely in use, as it would have been produced by a priest or educated person.

Contents


Reproduction of one of the columns

Some words have been translated, so it is possible to guess at the meaning of the text. The most likely theory is that it is some kind of religious calendar. The names of gods have been discovered along with various dates. Similar texts have been found in Roman artifacts, giving details and dates of ceremonies and rituals. This idea is reinforced by the repetition of certain words and phrases, like would be used in a religious litany.

Some of the names refer to local gods, so it is possible to narrow the probable origins of the book. Another clue is the form of the letters. It most likely came from an area southeast of Tuscany, near Lake Trasimeno. It was there that four major Etruscan cities were originally located, and they would have had a few temples that might have produced the book.

The Mummy

Some information was also discovered about the mummy. At first, all they could determine was that it was a female, and the odd nature of the excavation and sale did not give any extra clues. It was thought that she might have some relation to the Liber Linteus or the Etruscan people, but a papyrus scroll that had been buried with her identified her as an Egyptian. Her name was Nesi-hensu, wife of a Thebes tailor named Paher-hensu.

How the wrappings were transfered to Egypt will probably always remain a mystery. They may have been taken to Egypt around 80 BC, when many Etruscans fled from the Roman consul Sulla during the Roman-Etruscan Wars. No other similar wrappings have every been discovered, and the large body of text is still mostly undeciphered. The Liber Linteus, with its unknown meaning and origins, will remain one of the world's oddest language artifacts.

Liber Linteus - Mummified Language
Writer: Lucille Martin
Images:
Svícková: Lake Trasimeno (title)
SpeedyGonsales: Zagreb mummy; Liber linteus strips
Suradnik13: Archaeological Museum in Zagreb
Kalogeropoulos: Column of Liber Linteus
Sources:
• "Liber Linteus" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus>
• "The history of the Liber Linteus" The Etruscan Liber Linteus <http://www.oocities.org/athens/thebes/5181/etrusk/history.html>
• "Etruscan rites, rituals and prayers: the Liber Linteus of Zagreb" Ancient Worlds <http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Post/100106>
• "Liber Linteus, or 101 Uses for an Egyptian Mummy" Passing Strangeness <http://passingstrangeness.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/liber-linteus-or-101-uses-for-an-egyptian-mummy/>

All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except for Petey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.

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