This is the Bronze Liver of Piacenza. Piacenza is Classical Placentia, which was a Roman colony meaning “pleasing”; indeed, the English after the French called it Plaisance. (It is entirely unrelated to the word “placenta,” which comes from the Latin placenta uterina, “uterine cake,” as a placenta was a type of cake of Italian origin but of Greek etymology, coming from a word for “flat.”) The piece is an anatomically precise sheep’s liver inscribed with the names of Etruscan deities in the Etruscan alphabet, arranged according to their division of Heaven into sixteen parts. The reason it is a sheep’s liver is because of the Etruscan practice of “haruspicy,” divination by certain qualities of an animal’s liver like size and crease depth. One of the most interesting inscriptions to me is “MAË,” barely visible in the top left. The common etymology of “May” is that it comes from the Greek goddess Maia, who in a Homeric Hymn “To Hermes” is named the mother of Hermes: “…Maia gave him birth, / that nymph whose tresses are fair, having joined in love with Zeus, / being worthy of reverence. Shunning the throng of blessed gods, / she dwelt in a deep-shaded cave, where Kronos’ son used to join / … / While Hera whose arms are pale in the sweetness of sleep was clasped…” It is significant that “the immortals’ speedy messenger,” Hermes, was conceived by the god of heaven in a cave with a nymph on earth for two reasons: first, her being cave-dwelling suggests that she was an earth goddess whose worship was undertaken in a cave, i.e. “in the earth”; second, Hermes would be the perfect messenger between heaven and earth being born of both. There’s just one problem—the Romans got their fundamental worship and observance of the seasons from the Etruscans to the north, not the Greeks to the south. So when we see MAË on an Etruscan religious artifact and “e” at the end of Etruscan words denotes a grammatically masculine word, the Latin equivalent would be Maius. Now, the month of May was already called Maius mensis, assuming that “maius” was an adjective meaning “of Maia,” but the place of MAË on this liver suggests Ma(i)e is an epithet for Jupiter or Zeu-pater, Father Zeus. Now, it could still be Maia, the name borrowed from Greek as a stand-in for an equivalent Etruscan goddess, since the names of months could be of a high, Olympian origin—March for Mars, April for Aphrodite, June for Juno—or relatively lower origin, like Janus, Julius, or Augustus. Regardless, the liver is packed with the names of deities with and without Roman or Greek equivalents, or which would be combined into a single Greco-Roman god, simply expanding their domain and associated mythology. Many of the names on the liver correspond to the Liber Linteus, a liturgical calendar, that is, a calendar of religious rites and festivals to be performed on certain dates and dedicated to certain gods. The Etruscans wrote on libri lintei, “linen books,” which they would fold rather than roll like papyrus. Their linen was imported from Egypt. The Liber Linteus is simply the most prominent because it is the largest of these books (~3.5m x 35cm/13.8ft x 13.8cm) and provides a firsthand, finely detailed description of Etruscan religion, which is fundamental to the understanding of the formation of Roman religion. The coolest thing though is that the Liber Linteus is an honest-to-God recycled Egyptian mummy wrap.
Sources: Reading the Past: Etruscan by Larissa Bonfante; The Homeric Hymns translated by Michael Crudden; Around the Roman Table by Patrick Faas; The Dictionaries of Greek and Roman Geography, Antiquities, and Biography & Mythology, all edited by William Smith; The Bronze Liver of Piacenza by L.B. Van der Meer; The Online Etymology Dictionary by anonymous creator “etymonline”; and Wiktionary by the community.
