The Religion Of The Etruscans

Devotion to religion was the distinguishing characteristic of the Etruscan people, the most powerful civilization of Italy in the Archaic period. From a very early date, Etruscan religion spread its influence into Roman society, especially with the practice of divination. The Etruscan priest Spurinna, to give a well-known example, warned Caesar to beware the Ides of March. Yet despite the importance of religion in Etruscan life, there are relatively few modern comprehensive studies of Etruscan religion, and none in English. This volume seeks to fill that deficiency by bringing together essays by leading scholars that collectively provide a state-of-the-art overview of religion in ancient Etruria. The eight essays in this book cover all of the most important topics in Etruscan religion, including the Etruscan pantheon and the roles of the gods, the roles of priests and divinatory practices, votive rituals, liturgical literature, sacred spaces and temples, and burial and the afterlife. In addition to the essays, the book contains valuable supporting materials, including the first English translation of an Etruscan Brontoscopic Calendar (which guided priests in making divinations), Greek and Latin sources about Etruscan religion (in the original language and English translation), and a glossary. Nearly 150 black and white photographs and drawings illustrate surviving Etruscan artifacts and inscriptions, as well as temple floor plans and reconstructions.

This timely volume embraces and interprets the increasingly broad and deep canon of life narratives by African Americans. The contributors discover and recover neglected lives, texts, and genres, enlarge the wide range of critical methods used by scholars to study these works, and expand the understanding of autobiography to encompass photography, comics, blogs, and other modes of self-expression. This book also examines at length the proliferation of African American autobiography in the twenty-first century, noting the roles of digital genres, remediated lives, celebrity lives, self-help culture, non-Western religious traditions, and the politics of adoption. The life narratives studied range from an eighteenth-century criminal narrative, a 1918 autobiography, and the works of Richard Wright to new media, graphic novels, and a celebrity memoir from Pam Grier."

The Etruscan Brontoscopic Calendar is a rare document of omens foretold by thunder. It long lay hidden, embedded in a Greek translation within a Byzantine treatise from the age of Justinian. The first complete English translation of the Brontoscopic Calendar, this book provides an understanding of Etruscan Iron Age society as revealed through the ancient text, especially the Etruscans' concerns regarding the environment, food, health and disease. Jean MacIntosh Turfa also analyzes the ancient Near Eastern sources of the Calendar and the subjects of its predictions, thereby creating a picture of the complexity of Etruscan society reaching back before the advent of writing and the recording of the calendar.

By considering votive, mortuary and secular rituals, the volume offers a contribution to the continued study of Etruscan culture and gathers new material, interpretations and approaches to the less emphasized areas of Etruscan religion.

When St. Paul and St. Peter reached Rome they encountered a state-sponsored religion that had been established for centuries. Amid the shrines and temples of Rome, the Romans sought to preserve and strengthen a religion especially suited to the ambitious city. But Roman religion had also proved permeable to many influences, from Greece, Egypt, Persia, and other parts of Italy. What then was truly Roman, and what had Romans done with their borrowings to stamp them with Roman character? By exhaustive study of texts, inscriptions, and archaeology of Roman sacred places, Dumezil traces the formation of archaic Roman religion from Indo-European sources through the development of the rites and beliefs of the Roman republic. He describes a religion that was not only influenced by the other religions with which it came into contact, but influenced them as well, in mutual efforts to distinguish one nation from another. Even so, certain continuities were sustained in order to achieve a religion that crossed generations and ways of life. The worship of certain gods became the special concerns of certain parts of society, all of which needed attention to assure Rome's success in war, civil administration, and the production of food and goods.

This book explores how recent findings and research provide a richer understanding of religious activities in Republican Rome and contemporary central Italic societies, including the Etruscans, during the period of the Middle and Late Republic. While much recent research has focused on the Romanization of areas outside Italy in later periods, this volume investigates religious aspects of the Romanization of the Italian peninsula itself. The essays strive to integrate literary evidence with archaeological and epigraphic material as they consider the nexus of religion and politics in early Italy; the impact of Roman institutions and practices on Italic society; the reciprocal impact of non-Roman practices and institutions on Roman custom; and the nature of 'Roman', as opposed to 'Latin', 'Italic', or 'Etruscan', religion in the period in question. The resulting volume illuminates many facets of religious praxis in Republican Italy, while at the same time complicating the categories we use to discuss it.

The articles in this publication are presentations given during and offered to the Colloquium Material Aspects of Etruscan Religion, organised by the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University on 29 and 30 May 2008. They shed much new light upon religious aspects of sanctuaries, cities, settlements, necropoles, and tombs in Etruria, in the Po valley and in Campania. Also several, hitherto unpublished artefacts with ritual representations are commented on. A new analysis of the role, gestures and instruments of haruspices (divination experts) suggests that Etruscan divination is of Near Eastern origin. Interdisciplinary research on the function of litui proves that this curved staff of priests (but not of seers) probably originates also from the Near East. Finally, the religious background of Etruscan theatrical plays, always related to historical events in Roman history, is analysed. This BABESCH Supplement casts light on Etruscan gods, the process of anthropomorphisation, the cults, votive deposits, the cult places, also in necropoles, architectural decoration of temples and the relationship with representations on vases in the Faliscan border area of Etruria, rituals, and attributes of seers and priests. Further a new typology of altars is included. Extremely important are the results of very recent excavations in Tarquinia, at Gravisca, a multicultural harbour sanctuary near Tarquinia, at Marzabotto and several other places. The introduction sketches the main lines of the development of Etruscan religion with references to the contents of the colloquium papers.