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Diagram of the sheep's liver found near Piacenza with Etruscan inscriptions on the bronze sheep's Liver of Piacenza

In the religion of Ancient Rome, a haruspex (Plural haruspices; also called aruspex) 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 was also known by the Greek term, hepatoscopy (Also hepatomancy).

The Roman concept was directly derived from the Etruscan religion as one of the three branches of the disciplina Etrusca. Such methods continued to be used well into the Middle Ages, especially among the Christian apostates and pagans with Thomas Becket apparently consulting both an aruspex and a chiromancer prior to a royal expedition against Brittany.^[1]

The Latin terms, haruspex, haruspicina are from an archaic word, haru "entrails, intestines" (Cognate with hernia "protruding viscera" and hira "empty gut"; PIE *ǵʰer-) and from the root, spec- "to watch, observe". The Greek ἡπατοσκοπία hēpatoskōpia was from hēpar "liver" and skop- "to examine".

Ancient Near East

Akkadian language clay liver models written in a local dialect, recovered from the palace at Mari, dated to the 19th or 18th century BC.

The Babylonians are famous for hepatoscopy. This practice was mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel 21:21:

"For the king of Babylon standeth at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination; he shaketh the arrows to and fro, he inquireth of the teraphim, he looketh in the liver".^[2][3]

The Nineveh library texts named more than a dozen liver-related terms. The liver was considered the source of the blood and hence the basis of life itself. From this belief, the Babylonians thought that they could discover the will of the gods by examining the livers of the carefully selected sheep. A priest known as a bārû was specially trained to interpret the "signs" of the liver and the 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 was conserved in the British Museum.^[4] The model was used for divination which was important to Mesopotamian medicine. This practice was conducted by the priests and the seers who looked for signs in the stars or in the organs of the sacrificed animals to tell them things about a patient’s illness. The wooden pegs are placed in the holes of the clay tablet to record the features that are found in a sacrificed animal's liver. The seer used these features to predict the course of a patient's illness.

Haruspicy was part of a larger study of organs for the sake of divination called extispicy, paying particular attention to the positioning of the organs and their shape. There are many records of different peoples using the liver and spleen of various domestic and wild animals to forecast the weather. There are hundreds of ancient architectural objects, labyrinths composed of cobblestones in the northern countries that are considered to be a model of the intestines of the sacrificial animal, i.e. the colon of ruminants.

The Assyro-Babylonian tradition was also adopted in the Hittite religion. At least thirty-six liver-models are excavated at Hattusa. Of these, the majority are inscribed in Akkadian, but a few examples also had inscriptions in the native Hittite language, indicating the adoption of haruspicy as part of the native, vernacular cult.^[5]

Etruscan and Roman haruspicy

The Etruscans are also well known for the practice of divining by the entrails of sheep. A bronze sculpture of a liver known as the "Liver of Piacenza", dating to around 100 BC was discovered in 1877 near the town of Piacenza in northern Italy. It was marked with the name of regions assigned to various deities of the Etruscan religion.

The striking parallel not just of the prevalence of the practice of haruspicy, but the specific artifact type of liver models recording the significance of the various parts of the liver gave rise to the hypothesis of a strong cultural connection between Etruria and the Ancient Near East. From as early as 1900, Ludwig Stieda^{[citation needed]} sought to compare the Etruscan with the Babylonian artifacts. The parallel was 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.^[6]

The art of haruspicy was taught in the Libri Tagetici, a collection of texts attributed to Tages, a childlike being who figured in Etruscan mythology and who was discovered in an open field by Tarchon. The Libri Tagetici are translated into Latin and employed in reading omens.

The continuity of the Etruscan tradition among the Romans was indicated by several ancient literary sources, perhaps most famously in the incident related by Suetonius^[7] 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 was found about the haruspices in Bath, England where the base of a statue was dedicated by a haruspex named Memor.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• 
  Anthropomancy.


• 
  Augur.


• 
  Auspice.

References

Bibliography

External links

• 
   Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Haruspices". Encyclopædia Britannica. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 37–38. This source suggests that Greek and Roman haruspices used the entrails of human corpses; the victim should be "without spot or blemish".


• 
  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.