Liver of Piacenza
The Piacenza liver, a life-sized bronze model of a sheep's liver found in 1877 near Gossolengo in the countryside of Piacenza and dated to the late 2nd or early 1st century BC, is the most important surviving document of Etruscan divination. Its convex upper surface is divided into sixteen inscribed zones, each naming a deity or region of the sky, and its outer edge is marked out in sectors, mapping the heavenly templum onto the organ of sacrifice. Etruscan haruspices read the future from the form, markings, and lobes of a sacrificial animal's liver, and the model, with its ritual vocabulary o