CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

NUMBERS AND RECKONING:

A WHOLE CIVILIZATION

FOUNDED UPON DIVISIONS

Daniele F. Maras

A

ccording to the literary sources, the Etruscans paid special attention to division of
land as well as to partitions of time, regions of the sky and generally to an orderly
distribution of every natural and human phenomenon within precise boundaries.
Boundaries: this seems to be the key to understanding the core of the Etruscan
meaning of life.^1 Certainly it is not by chance that the only surviving fragments of
Etruscan literature, in translations by Latin (and Greek) authors, are passages of the so-
called Gromatici veteres, the ancient land surveyors (among them the famous Prophecy of
Vegoia),^2 and Nigidius Figulus’ brontoscopic calendar, handed down in a Greek version
by John Lydus.^3
Classical authors indeed suggest that the Etruscans were obsessed with the correct
disposition of space and time, measuring and observation of which could result in the
interpretation of the true will of the gods.
In such a civilization, which cared so much for measuring and divisions and is even
said to have invented the astronomically oriented division of land (Hyg. Grom., Const.
lim., 166 Lach.),^4 it is not surprising to fi nd a good amount of information about numbers
and their application both in ordinary life and in sacred as well as public contexts.
In the following pages I will outline the archaeological, linguistic and historical
evidence on this critical concept in Etruscan culture.

NUMBERS

As the fi rst step in our journey through Etruscan reckoning systems, we need to show
what evidence we have about the lexical and grammatical forms of the numbers,^5 which
have been dealt with as an independent aspect of Etruscan studies for more than a century.
The key to the knowledge of the names of the fi rst six numbers has been the fi nding
of two dice in Vulci (not at Tuscania, as is often stated^6 ), which do not show the usual
numbers in the form of a series of dots or lines, but the corresponding Etruscan words
inscribed on each face (Fig. 23.1). On opposite faces, whose sum should be 7 if the
Etruscans used the same system as other classical peoples (s. Anth.Pal. XIV, 8),^7 are