Michael Weiss’s Language and Ritual in Sabellic Italy is a close study of the third and fourth tablets of the Umbrian “Iguvine Tablets,” a group of seven bronze tablets found in Italy in 1444. The Umbrian language of the tablets is one of the Sabellic languages of Italy, a group of languages that together with Latin formed the Italic group of Indo-European languages. The tablets themselves, as the back cover of the book explains, “record the rites and laws of a priestly brotherhood, the Fratres Atiedii, with a degree of detail unparalleled in ancient Italy.”
After an introduction that explains the methods of the book, and also contains a long response to one recent attempt at interpretation, Weiss moves to five chapters of detailed line-by-line analysis of the text of the tablets. The Umbrian language is still only partially understood, so there are in fact many linguistic obscurities in the texts. But linguistic analysis alone cannot explain the tablets, so Weiss brings comparative religion and mythology to bear on the texts as well. He draws extensively from several non-Italic ancient traditions—especially Classical Greek and Vedic Sanskrit—in addition to studies of Latin rituals. Though Weiss’s study does not fully explain all of the obscurities of the texts, it does present the most complete and convincing analysis available. After a long, detailed examination of the texts of these two tablets that looks at each word and concept involved, Weiss’s conclusion is that the tablets describe the preparations for a rite, and the rite itself, associated with New Year’s Day. “The chief divine honorands,” he suggests, “are a god and goddess who hypostatize aspects of the year and its cyclical nature” (441). This Umbrian rite has, as might be expected, a number of ancient parallels in other Indo-European cultures, but Weiss also shows that it even has some more recent parallels—he cites as an example a description written by Thomas Pennant in 1771 of a celebration of Beltane, current in his time, that, as Weiss says, is “a striking parallel to the Iguvine rite as I reconstruct it” (345).
Though some might, perhaps, be put off by the book’s philological and technical detail—Weiss’s primary methods are those of Indo-European historical and comparative linguistics—this is nonetheless a book that will be of interest to anyone studying ancient religions, ritual, and sacrifice. It is a model study that shows how the use of philological and comparative methods can illuminate an otherwise obscure ancient text.
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[Review length: 410 words • Review posted on June 2, 2011]