The Etruscan Liver of Piacenza

It was the year of 1877. The day was one of those pleasant days of late September, in the countryside of Piacenza, Italy, when the still warm sunrays dissipate, unwillingly, the sparse and lingering morning mist. The plough-man, at the farm of count Arcelli, was manoeuvring the plough with artful and assertive hands, assiduously keeping a watchful eye on the two powerful oxen vigorously pulling the implement with magnanimous patience. The fragrant odour emanating from the fresh and humid furrow-slices, torn by the shiny razor-sharp blade of the plough, was wafting through the still air blending , at once, with the pungent odour of the sweating oxen. All around, there were hungry tail-wagging birds gulping down the juicy and frantic worms. The laboured panting of the slobbering animals was synchronous with the heavy, but nonetheless rhythmic, steady plodding of their footsteps, and with the squeaking of the yoke and harness. Once in a while the voice of the plough-man could be heard when, with the aid of the goad, he had to warn or encourage one or the other ox. These sounds were coalescing with the faint sliding sound of the loamy clods rearing, stiffly, upward along the concave blade of the plough, and their inevitable crumbling on top of the previous furrow. The totality of this microcosm, in the bucolic silence of the farmlands of Piacenza of 130 years ago, was conformant to a magical pastoral symphony, following the ancestral agrarian liturgy of thousands of years, when man was still able to communicate with nature. Suddenly, this harmonious tableau was interrupted by a brief, dissonant sound, of metal against metal. Instantly the plough-man commanded the oxen to stop. Astonished, he examined the furrow, and something strange captured his attention, something protruding from the furrow freshly turned over. He grabbed it and brushed away the sticky soil. The convex side of the small object fitted nicely in the palm of his hand; on the opposite side, slightly concave, there were three protruding features of dissimilar form and size. The plough-man was unable to understand what this object could be used for or the reason why it was unearthed that particular day. He kept turning it over and over in his calloused hands, then, somewhat annoyed, flung it under one of the many Lombardy poplars aligned along the banks of the irrigation canal, and continued ploughing. At dusk, after having finished another long day of work, the man picked up the strange object, undid the oxen harness, and lead them towards home and a well deserved rest. This is the way, in all likelihood, that the "Iecur Placentinum", that is to say the "liver of Piacenza", was unexpectedly discovered. This object is one of the most singular artifact of antiquity and the only one of its kind ever found in the history of the Etruscan archaeology. It was indeed found by a humble man, during a simple rural activity, at a depth of about 25 cm., in an ordinary meadow not far from Settima of Ciavernasco, approximately a kilometre from the right bank of the Trebbia river. Similar to the discovery of the "liver" is the legend of the birth of Tages. He was the divinity with the body of a child and the intellect of an old and wise man born out of a furrow in the vicinity of Tarquinia, and, according to the Etruscan mythology, revealed their sacred scriptures. The precious bronze artifact from Piacenza was eventually bought by the Count Francesco Caracciolo, who subsequently donated it to the Civic Museum of the city on the first of August 1894. It weighs 635 grams and measures 126 x 76 x 60 cm., and represents, with evident fidelity, the "stylized" form of a liver of a sheep. On the top surface, slightly concave, there are three protuberances, one of which represents the gall bladder, as well as 40 Etruscan inscriptions divided in 16 sectors; two other inscriptions are found on the convex bottom side. In the 16 sectors are the names of 30 gods found in the Etruscan mythology, so that each name corresponds to a specific division of the heavens, in exactly the same way that the Etruscan themselves had divided the universe. In fact, in their religion, the liver was a representation of the cosmic order. For a few years after the discovery, nobody realized the connection to the "liver", the significance of the artifact, what it would be used for or were it came from. Only after more in depth studies from historians like W. Deecke (1880), G. Körte (1905), C. O. Thulin (1906), M. Pallottino (1956) and Maggiani (1982) [L. B. Van Der Meer, "The Bronze Liver of Piacenza"], its great importance was finally understood.
The archeologist Luigi Adriano Milani, director of the Archeological Royal Museum in Florence, was the first to identify it as a "liver" in the year 1900 ("Libertà", 1977), followed by Körte in 1905. The same Körte had noticed that in the Museum Guarnacci, in Volterra, there was a cover of an urn with a statue of an "haruspex", by the name of Aule Lecu, holding a “liver” in his hand, very similar to the one discovered near Piacenza ("Libertà", 1977). The Etruscan haruspex had the authority to interpret the will of the gods by observing special signs present in the liver of the newly immolated sheep; therefore the bronze model could be, as postulated by many experts, a practical guidebook or manual. The historian Werner Keller specifies, in his volume "The Etruscan", that the interpretation of the entrails of animals was a very complex endeavour. In order to be able to offer a sound and unequivocal prophecy, the haruspex had to be an expert not only in astronomy but also in anatomy and pathology. Nobody has yet been able to explain how come this Etruscan object was found in a field in the municipality of Gossolengo, since, until now at least, only a few sparse artifacts have come to light and no other archaeological indications of their presence in the area have been found. In 1987, the Dutch historian L. B. Van Der Meer proposes, in his volume "The Bronze Liver of Piacenza", the theory that perhaps an Etruscan haruspex, in the service of a Roman general, lost this object during a military expedition between the years 150 and 30 B. C. To be more specific, he outlines three events that would make his theory plausible: "the defeat of consul Papirius Carbo by Sulla's general, M. Aemilius Lucullus in 82 B. C., the expedition of Pompey against M. Aemilius Lepidus in 77 B. C. or the mutiny of Ceasar's legions in Piacenza in 49 B. C. Nonetheless he goes on to say that it is practically impossible to determine the date with certitude, since these kind of “manuals” “could be bequeathed by father to son". There have been many studies and publications on the topic of the “Etruscan Liver of Piacenza”, evidence of the importance of this artifact, but at the same time they underline the difficulties in reconciling the many, and often conflicting, opinions of the experts. The "Etruscan Liver of Piacenza", this exceptional and arcane object, can be admired by visiting the Civic Museum of Piacenza, housed in the grandiose Palazzo Farnese.