Agramer mummy bandage
Agram Mummy Bandage (s) or Zagreb Mummy Bandage (Latin: Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis ) is the name of an old linen book that is written in Etruscan language and script and is kept in the Archaeological Museum Zagreb (formerly: Agram). It is the longest Etruscan text known today.
The book
The 3.40 meter long strip of linen was preserved because it was reused as a mummy bandage. The linen strip is labeled in 12 columns of 24 centimeters wide and was probably folded like a fan-fold so that each column formed a page. The around 250-100 BC Written text is only partially understandable and describes a religious ritual. The linen book was torn into eight strips for the bandage of the mummy. The twelve columns of the text comprise approx. 230 lines and approx. 1200 readable words, of which 50 are different expressions. They are written in red and black ink. The numerous repetitions are explained by the ritual character of the text. The text is largely untranslated. Only a few words are understood, from which the ritual character of the text emerges. The Agramer mummy bandage was also called a ritual calendar, which describes the ceremonies that were dedicated to the respective gods for each day. Similar Etruscan calendars are known in Latin translation. Today only five of the stripes of the torn script are in the Zagreb Archaeological Museum. The beginning of the text is considered lost. The end, however, seems to have been preserved, as the last strip ends with a white area. Some passages seem hymn-like, for example: ceia hia in column 7, as well as variations of the passage šacnicleri cilθl špureri meθlumeri enaš .
origin
Local names of gods in the text suggest that a narrow area in southern Tuscany near Lake Trasimeno , where the former Etruscan cities of Arezzo , Perugia , Chiusi and Cortona are located, is a possible place of manufacture. The date of the text was determined by comparing styles with other Etruscan monuments to at least 250 BC. Chr. Determined.
Find and research history
The female Egyptian mummy from the Alexandria Ptolemaic period was acquired by Michael von Barich (1792-1859) in Egypt around 1849, brought to Vienna as a souvenir and, after his death in 1859, bequeathed to the Agramer Museum by his brother in 1867. In the same year, the German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch copied what he believed to be Egyptian hieroglyphics . In 1877 he and Richard Burton realized that it was apparently a philologically important text that had been written in another language. He now thought it was a translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead into Arabic script . In 1891 the bandages were examined in Vienna by Jakob Krall , an expert on Coptic writing . He thought the text was written in either Coptic, Libyan or Carian script. However, he was the first to realize that the language was Etruscan and put the stripes together correctly.
literature
- Jakob Krall: The Etruscan mummy bandages of the Agramer National Museum. F. Tempsky, Vienna 1892.
- Ferréol Butavand: Le secret du texte étrusque de la momie de Zagreb. Adrien-Maisonneuve, Paris 1936.
- Ambros Josef Pfiffig : Studies on the Agramer mummy bandages. The Etruscan Liber linteus. Memoranda of the ÖAdW, phil-hist. Class. Vol. 81. Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1963.
- Giuliano Bonfante , Larissa Bonfante : The Etruscan Language, an Introduction. University of Manchester Press, Manchester 2002, ISBN 0-7190-5540-7 .
- L. Bouke van der Meer : Liber linteus zagrabiensis. The Linen Book of Zagreb. A Comment on the Longest Etruscan Text. Peeters, Louvain MA 2007, ISBN 90-429-2024-6 .
