Haruspex
For the genus of beetles, see Haruspex (beetle).
In the religion of Ancient Rome, a haruspex (plural
divination; he shakes the arrows, he consults
the household idols, he looks at the liver.”
The Nineveh library texts name more than a dozen liverrelated terms. The liver was considered the source of the
blood and hence the basis of life itself. From this belief, the Babylonians thought they could discover the will
of the gods by examining the livers of carefully selected
sheep. A priest known as a bārû was specially trained to
interpret the “signs” of the liver, and Babylonian scholars
assembled a monumental compendium of omens called
the Bārûtu. The liver was divided into sections, with each
section representing a particular deity.
One Babylonian clay model of a sheep’s liver, dated between 1900 and 1600 BC, is conserved in the British Museum.[1] The model was used for divination, which was
important to Mesopotamian medicine. This practice was
conducted by priests and seers who looked for signs in the
stars, or in the organs of sacrificed animals, to tell them
things about a patient’s illness. Wooden pegs were placed
in the holes of the clay tablet to record features found in
a sacrificed animal’s liver. The seer then used these features to predict the course of a patient’s illness.
Diagram of the sheep’s liver found at Picenum with Etruscan
inscriptions on the bronze sheep’s Liver of Piacenza
haruspices) was a person trained to practice a form of
divination called haruspicy (haruspicina) the inspection
of the entrails (exta), hence also extispicy (extispicium) of
sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep
and poultry. The reading of omens specifically from the
liver is also known by the Greek term hepatoscopy (also Haruspicy was part of a larger study of organs for the sake
hepatomancy).
of divination, called extispicy, paying particular attention
The Roman concept is directly derived from Etruscan re- to the positioning of the organs and their shape. There
ligion, as one of the three branches of the disciplina Etr- are many records of different peoples using the liver and
usca. Haruspicy as practiced by the Romans and Etr- spleen of various domestic and wild animals to forecast
uscans has direct precedents in the religions of the An- weather. There are hundreds of ancient architectural obcient Near East since at least the Middle Bronze Age jects, labyrinths composed of cobblestones in the north(c. 2000 BC) and apparently reached Italy via Anatolian ern countries that are considered to be a model of the
intestines of the sacrificial animal, i.e. the colon of rumi(Hittite, Luwian) transmission.
nants.
The Latin terms haruspex, haruspicina are from an archaic word haru “entrails, intestines” (cognate with her- The Assyro-Babylonian tradition was also adopted in
nia “protruding viscera”, and hira “empty gut"; PIE Hittite religion. At least thirty-six liver-models have been
*ǵʰer-) and from the root spec- “to watch, observe”. The excavated at Hattusa. Of these, the majority are inscribed
Greek ἡπατοσκοπία hēpatoskōpia is from hēpar “liver” in Akkadian, but a few examples also have inscriptions
in the native Hittite language, indicating the adoption of
and skop- “to examine”.
haruspicy as part of the native, vernacular cult.[2]
1
Ancient Near East
2 Etruscan and Roman haruspicy
Further information: Bārûtu
The Etruscans were also well known for the practice of
The Babylonians were famous for hepatoscopy. This divining by the entrails of sheep. A bronze sculpture
practice is mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel 21:21:
of a liver known as the "Liver of Piacenza", dating to
around 100 BC, was discovered in 1877 near the town
“For the king of Babylon stands at the parting
of Piacenza in northern Italy. It is marked with the name
of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use
of regions assigned to various deities of Etruscan religion.
1
2
4 NOTES
the liver has given rise to the hypothesis of a strong cultural connection between Etruria and the Ancient Near
East. From as early as 1900, Ludwig Stieda sought to
compare the Etruscan with the Babylonian artefacts. The
parallel is taken as one of the main pieces of evidence
by those arguing for Etruscan origins in Anatolia, alongside Herodotus' (1.94) claim that the "Tyrrhenians" descended from the Lydians, and the linguistic relationship
between Etruscan and Lemnian.[3]
The art of haruspicy was taught in the Libri Tagetici, a
collection of texts attributed to Tages, a childlike being
who figures in Etruscan mythology, and who was discovered in an open field by Tarchon; the Libri Tagetici were
translated into Latin and employed in reading omens.
The continuity of the Etruscan tradition among the Romans is indicated by several ancient literary sources, perhaps most famously in the incident related by Suetonius[4]
in which a haruspex named Spurinna warned Julius Caesar to beware the Ides of March.
The emperor Claudius was a student of the Etruscan language and antiquities, and opened a college to preserve
and improve their art, which lasted until the reign of
Theodosius I, the Christian emperor who dismantled the
last active vestiges of the traditional state cult. Further
evidence has been found of haruspices in Bath, England
where the base of a statue dedicated by a haruspex named
Memor.
Haruspicy was practiced from 4000–300 BCE
3 See also
• Anthropomancy
• Augur
• Auspice
4 Notes
[1] WA 92668 (britishmuseum.org).
Old Assyrian clay liver models recovered from the palace at Mari,
dated to the 19th or 18th century BC.
The striking parallel not just of the prevalence of the practice of haruspicy, but the specific artefact type of liver
models recording the significance of the various parts of
[2] four specimens are known to Güterbock (1987): CTH
547 II, KBo 9 67, KBo 25, KUB 4 72 (VAT 8320
in Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, for which see also
George Sarton, Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of
Greece (1952, 1970), p. 93, citing Alfred Boissier, Mantique babylonienne et mantique hittite (1935).
[3] “it is possible that the mysterious Etruscan brought Babylonian hepatoscopy with them from Western Asia” George
Sarton, Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece
(1952, 1970), p. 93
[4] Suetonius, Divus Julius 81.
3
5
References
• Walter Burkert, 1992. The Orientalizing Revolution:
Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early
Archaic Age (Thames and Hudson), pp 46–51.
• Derek Collins, “Mapping the Entrails: The Practice
of Greek Hepatoscopy” American Journal of Philology 129 [2008]: 319-345
• Marie-Laurence Haack, Les haruspices dans le
monde romain (Bordeaux : Ausonius, 2003).
• Hans Gustav Güterbock, 'Hittite liver models’
in: Language, Literature and History (FS Reiner)
(1987), 147-153, reprinted in Hoffner (ed.) Selected
Writings, Assyriological Studies no. 26 (1997).
6
External links
• Haruspices, article in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek
and Roman Antiquities
• Figurine of Haruspex, 4th Cent. B.C. Vatican Museums Online, Gregorian Etruscan Museum, Room
III
• l. Starr (1992). “Chapters 1 and 2 of the bārûtu”.
State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 6: 45–53.
4
7 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES
7
Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses
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• Haruspex Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex?oldid=674693769 Contributors: Ihcoyc, EALacey, Haukurth, Wetman, Dale
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and Anonymous: 56
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• File:Divinatory_livers_Louvre_AO19837.jpg Source:
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