It's humiliating for me to confess that until a few weeks ago I had never heard of the Piacenza Liver, which is a life-size bronze Etruscan replica of the liver of a sheep, and unquestionably European civilization's most heralded metal liver. How could I not have known?
The PL was unearthed in 1877 and dates from the first century BCE. Here's a picture of this most important artifact:

Because my knowledge of sheep livers is so appallingly slim, and because most readers of this blague are not doubt similarly ignorant, let me quote an expert description of the object: "In the Etruscan model, the liver is reversed, with the convex part of the gallbladder pointing down. On the right side of the gallbladder, we find a pyramid-shaped structure that was referred to as the processus pyramidalis corresponding with the caudate lobe in humans. On the other side of the gallbladder, we see a protrusion that was called the processus papillaris corresponding with the paracaval part of the caudate lobe." In other words, it's one heck of an accurate liver model. Yet It is not its fidelity to the shape and form of a sheep liver that makes the PL so crucial: it's the markings and inscriptions on its face. As you can see, the surface of the PL is divided into segments, on each one of which is inscribed a word or two in the long-extinct Etruscan language.
This find is obviously not one of your run-of-the-mill uninformative liver sculptures. It's brimming with meaning. Let us recall that Etruria was an advanced and prosperous civilization that dominated northwestern Italy from about 800 BCE to 500 BCE until it gradually fell under the sway of the ambitious militaristic Romans. In the ancient world, Etruscans were famous not only for their arts and commerce, but also for their skill in consulting the gods through the process of haruscopy -- divination by examining the liver of a sacrificed sheep. The Etruscans passed along this accomplishment to the Romans who rarely made important decisions without the advice of the gods, which they acquired through the medium of a professionally certified haruspex. Inasmuch as the Romans, employing haruscopy, ruled the world for a thousand years, the power of the sheep liver-and-haruspex team cannot but be acknowledged.
I have no idea, nor do scholars of the Etruscans, know when or why haruscopy originated. Etruscan civilization is replete with mysteries and moreover the Etruscan language is not fully understood. It's an "isolate" -- like Basque --an island in a sea of Indo-European languages to which it bears no relation. Etruscans arrived in Italy a long time ago -- long before they possessed a written language. When? From where did they come? How did it happen that they became proficient in haruscopy? No one knows and there are not even any decent theories -- it's all lost in the dark backward and abysm of time.
Readers of a skeptical bent will wonder, what special powers are incorporated in the liver of a sheep? Why not the pancreas or the spleen? Some might even ask, why a sheep? Why not, for example, goats? Goats are far more intelligent than sheep, and it stands to reason that a goat liver would house more prophetic oomph than the liver of a mouflon or an urial. For that matter, why is haruscopy to be preferred to less messy systems of augury such as ornithomancy, which utilizes the flights of birds, or ceraunoscopy, which works by the study of lightning and thunder. No bloody sacrificing required in either case. Livers, in my opinion, though I've never come face to face with a sheep's, are kind of gross and not for the squeamish. But as William Cowper told us many years ago, "God moves in a mysterious way,/ His wonders to perform" and although Cowper was not specifically referring to the multiple gods of the polytheistic Etruscans, his words certainly apply. So divination by liver it was and has remained so. Whether or not the Romans would have conquered the world without the Etruscan facility with sheep livers is impossible to say.
A closer look at the PL reveals that each demarcated section is inscribed with a series of Etruscan letters. Inasmuch as Etruscan is an extinct language that has been only deciphered in part, the words are not fully understood. Although Etruscan is almost impossible to translate, it's easy to transliterate, because the script is written in a version of the alphabet devised by some Phoenician genius and then passed along to the Euboean Greeks and then on to the Etruscans and to the Romans and eventually to us.
Here's the most recent transcription of a part of the outside ring of words on the PL.
1. tin cil en
2. tin thvf
3. tines neθ
4. uni (thought to be Etruscan equivalent of Juno i.e. Iuno)
5. tec
6. lvsl
7. neθ (thought to be Neptune)
8. caθ
9. fufluns (Bacchus?)
10. selva (Silvanus?)
11. leθns
12. tluscv
Kind of impenetrable, is it not? Almost entirely opaque with only a few good guesses. But, alas, that's the sorry state of Piacenza Liver knowledge. Scholars are agreed that the markings are the names of the various gods -- each associated with a section of the live. It follows that the PL is a teaching instrument, a show-and-tell. It's not difficult to picture a veteran learned haruspex instructing his or her aspiring students to study the PL closely. Any peculiarity or disorder or irregularity in the liver would reveal much to a gifted haruspex.
It's shocking to me that the tourist-oriented website of the city of Piacenza advertises its Duomo, a 12th century Romanesque church, its Passerini-Landi Library, and the Palazzo Farnese, a 16th century great house, but offers not the slightest mention of its foremost liver (which is housed in the palazzo). An inexplicable omission.
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