History: Hepatoscopy and the Census

INDIVIDUAL

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     INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

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"Perhaps it was merely an oversight of this historian that he failed to mention another religious practice, hepatoscopy. For this, the Romans down to imperial times relied on Etruscans. Divination from the liver of sacrificed animals was a most complicated business.

To get the interpretation right required a sound knowledge not only of astronomy but also of anatomy and pathology. In 1877 at Piacenza a bronze model of a liver was found. It was evidently a model used in a priests' school for teaching the art of haruspicy, and of a fairly late period. On the upper surface are marked sixteen divisions in which are inscribed the names of some thirty gods, some more than once. Each of the sixteen divisions corresponded to a section of the heavens, for the Etruscans regarded the liver as an image of the cosmos, as a microcosm of the universe. The liver, it was believed, exactly reproduced the heavenly firmament with its sacred laws and controlling divinities and its division, first into four, by the intersecting axes and then into sixteen subdivisions." p.87.

The Etruscans

"Censuses for purposes of taxation and military service still exist. But not many know that it was an Etruscan king who first legally established such a registration in Rome, from whence, with the rise of the Roman empire, it spread throughout Europe."  "What this measure was is stated by Livy thus: 'The population was divided into classes and 'centuries' according to a scale based on the census, and suitable for both peace and war." p.146.

Keller, W. (1975) The Etruscans. Norfolk: Book Club Associates. [Cover image: AbeBooks]