
The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text - curtis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus
======
dzdt
My favorite science story about the Etruscan language is using statistics of
dice to clarify the words for numbers.

Dice were popular in ancient Mediterranean cultures. The older number
arrangement put usually 1 opposite 2; 3 opposite 4; 5 opposite 6. At some
point it shifted to the more modern 1-6; 2-5; 3-4 arrangement.

Usually dice used dots or "pips" as today, but an example was found numbered
with Etruscan words. Arguing from statistics of how dice were numbered, they
convincingly identified the pairs of numbers. This resolves an ambiguity from
other literary sources about the Etruscan words for 4 and 6.

[1]
[http://www.academia.edu/download/44616033/GAMBLING_WITH_ETRU...](http://www.academia.edu/download/44616033/GAMBLING_WITH_ETRUSCAN_DICE_A_TALE_OF_NU20160411-9102-1hk178p.pdf)

~~~
selimthegrim
Link is broken.

~~~
yorwba
[http://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.joule.2018.11.021](http://sci-
hub.tw/10.1016/j.joule.2018.11.021)

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vmh1928
Recall that the Ptolemaic Kingdom was created out of the break-up of the
Alexander the Great's empire. The Wikipedia article gives 320BC to 30BC. Its
leaders were Macedonian Greeks. The Greeks had trading cities along the
Italian Peninsula as far back as the 600 BC era, in part to trade with the
Etruscans. It's not that difficult to conceive of this cloth(250BC,) being
included in some trade shipment that ended up in Alexandria and then carried
up the Nile to Thebes.

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inawarminister
If only we have a Rosetta Stone of Etruscan and Minoan. Pre-Indo-European
central Mediterranean will perhaps remain obscure for us forever...

Still, the fact that an Egyptian got buried in a recycled religious treatise
of another people across the sea is quite interesting. Especially post-250BC
is quite deep in Ptolemaic rule in Egypt and Roman conquest of Etruria.

~~~
binarray2000
(1) Even according to Wikipedia: "The Etruscans called themselves Rasenna,
which was syncopated to Rasna or Raśna(...)"

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_civilization](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_civilization)

(2) Again, even according to Wikipedia: "Rascians (Latin: Rasciani, Natio
Rasciana; Serbian: Рашани / Rašani) was a common exonym for Serbs during the
late medieval and the early modern period. It was used most frequently in the
Kingdom of Hungary, and also in the Habsburg Monarchy. The term was derived
from the Latinized name for the central Serbian region of Raška (Latin:
Rascia; Serbian Cyrillic: Рашка). In medieval and early modern Western
sources, exonym Rascia was often used as a designation for Serbian lands in
general, and consequently the term Rasciani became one of the most common
designations for Serbs.(...)"

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascians](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascians)

(3) During WWII, Svetislav Bilbija was a secretary to an episkop of the
Serbian Orthodox Church (equivalent to a bishop in RCC) in Italy where he has
cracked the code of Etruscan because he had noticed the similarity of Etruscan
letters and modern serbian cyrillic.

Ofcouse, connecting a culture that is precursor to the Roman culture (to which
the modern West sees itself as a successor) with some (now) small peoples from
the Balkans, peoples that have been put on a shame pole for the last 30 years,
the Serbs - that is a big no, no. Which is why you'll find people who smear
the work of Bilbija. But, some have a different opinion. For example, people
at the Rand Corporation (yes, that US military contractor), or at least those
on their mailing list:

“In a brillant piece of work rivalling that of Michael Ventris, Bilbija has
deciphered the Etruscan Mummy Book.”

[http://ixoloxi.com/voynich/etruscan.txt](http://ixoloxi.com/voynich/etruscan.txt)

They refer to this book (which has a direct connection to The Mummy of
Zagreb):

[https://books.google.ba/books/about/The_Mummy_of_Zagreb_and_...](https://books.google.ba/books/about/The_Mummy_of_Zagreb_and_Other_Etruscan_L.html?id=947InAEACAAJ&redir_esc=y)

~~~
samastur
Look mate, as a fellow Slav from Slovenia I can assure you all our common
ancestors stumbled here way too late to have anything to do with Etruscans.

And then there are also excellent arguments made in other comments.

~~~
new2627
You are right, but just to nitpick, linguistic ancestors don't always overlap
with genetic ancestors. It could well be that your linguistic ones stumbled
there late, whereas your genetic ones lived there for thousands and thousands
of years longer. A handful of people can convince many to change language,
genetic change is much slower. This is one reason why people in the region are
genetically relatively similar, whether they speak slavic, germanic, finno-
ugric, or latin languages.

For all these reasons, if etruscans once lived where you live now, it would
actually be rather surprising if you had no connection whatsoever to them.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> if etruscans once lived where you live now

There is no evidence that Etruscans ever lived where the OP does now. All
evidence we have about Etruscans points to a people living in the
Mediterranean region, not further north in the Balkans. Note that although the
article here is about a linen book in Zagreb, the Zagreb Museum was only the
final resting place of an artifact created elsewhere; it does not mean that
Etruscans had anything to do with the Balkans.

~~~
new2627
I see, you are right, but I was answering to a more general point made by OP,
that if those who speak your language arrived late, you could still have a
connection with those who lived there before.

~~~
microwavecamera
Culture and genetics are not necessarily related. Unless they still happen to
speak Etruscan, sharing a little DNA with ancient Etruscans doesn't make them
"Etruscan".

~~~
ithkuil
Toponyms often survive after a new language fully replaces the language of a
people.

BTW Serbia is not really "north" in the Balkans. But still, it's pretty far
away: on the opposite side of the Adriatic see and of the entire Italian
peninsula (etruria is on the tyrrhenian coast)

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tomcam
Etruscan art is much livelier and more graceful than Roman art. Well worth a
quick search, or much better, a museum visit.

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erikpukinskis
I think AIs will be good at deciphering things like this. They can wear a text
like this as a pair of glasses and wander a virtual Earth, read other texts,
time travel, and wait millions of man-years for a single affordance.

The same work an amateur anthropologist does, but with more patience and
better scrapbooking skills, basically.

Although by the time AIs exist that can do this, amateur anthropologists will
have much better digital tools as well.

