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.
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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