- Adrian P. Harrison –
entrails of sacrifi ced animals (Harrison et al. 2010). Haruspicy and the recognition of
adverse conditions through haruspicy, the practice of scrutinizing the livers of sacrifi ced
sheep (and later, during the fi rst century bc, the entire viscera of various victims) would
have furnished data on the relative health of the food supply and thus of humans in a
given area. If the haruspex priest could see dire information in the livers of sacrifi ced
victims, they could call for expiation, lustration or presumably other forms of group
religious response to adverse phenomena.
Birds were also used as a means of predicting the future, and since the skies of Etruria
were fi lled with birds, carefully studied by the haruspices. Pliny recounts that species,
such as eagles (known from the glosses as Etruscan antar), hawks (Etr. arac) and falcons
(Etr. capu) were present. Moreover, in the François Tomb we see a woodpecker on the
verge of fl ying away in a scene denoting augury, in the observation of the fl ight of birds
(auspicium, see Chapter 26).
Finally, there is mention of the ancient Etruscan ritual of dii animales in which the
sacrifi cal offering of an animal could enable the soul of a departed relative to commune
with the Gods, although sadly the ritual has been lost and all that remains are much later
texts that attribute it to the Etruscans. Arnobius, writing around 305 ad, states that the
Etruscan libri Acherontici say that through the offering of blood from particular animals,
certain divinities can be summoned who have the power to overturn the rules of mortality
and confer godlike status on the spirits of the dead. Sadly, there remains little indication
as to which animals or indeed which gods were involved in this ritual (Becker et al.
2009: 104–108). Cremation burials ought to preserve some evidence of the procedure,
but the only samples recovered by Becker and colleagues were found to be of immature
mammals although whether these represented lambs, piglets, puppies or kit rabbits was
not discernible owing to the fragmented nature of the material.
This study was initiated with the intention of suggesting some associations between
animals and the beliefs and lifestyles of ancient Etruria. Since the topic and corpus of
evidence are too vast to yield complete conclusions, this chapter should rather be considered
as a work in progress. It has not yet been possible to catalogue all extant representations
of all the creatures represented in the Etruscan artistic world, just as physical evidence of
animal species (from food remains, votive deposits and other archaeological fi nds) has not
been collated into a single source (cf. Turfa 2012, Chapter 5). However, it is hoped that
readers with access to archaeological or art historical data will update this record with the
fi ndings of their own research.^1
NOTE1 The author is indebted to the enthusiastic help freely given by Birgitte Holle in connection
with the cataloguing of Etruscan artifacts containing animal motifs. I would also like to
thank especially Dr Judith Swaddling of the British Museum and Dr Jean MacIntosh Turfa
at the University of Pennsylvania Museum for their support and help with this endeavor. I
am also indebted to Dr Jan Kindberg Jacobsen from Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek for his kind
and generous help, and to Bolette Madsen for her hard work in converting my many images
into illustrations (www.bmmadsen.dk). Finally, but by no means least, I acknowledge the
assistance and patience of those Museum attendants around the world who have put up
with my cataloguing work over the past two years, and who continue to accommodate my
eccentricities.