Zagreb Museum
Zagreb Archaeological Museum is somewhat of a disappointment. The building itself is imposing enough and the advertising outside appears to promise all sorts of delights within, but once you have paid your 20 kuna you discover that all is not as it had seemed.
The building has five stories, but the ground floor turns out to be nothing more than reception. Presumably there are offices in the rest of the space. To the right of the reception desk there is a gloomy little room which may possibly contain a numatist's tresure trove, but it is too dark to tell. The only bit I could actually make out in the gloom were two small display cases filled with a cascade of silver coins, a possible hint at the riches elsewhere in the room. If you are into coins, the only thing to do is bring a good torch with you.
You reach the first floor via what must have been a fairly imposing staircase when the building was a private residence. (There is an aniquated lift for those who find stairs a problem.) There are a number of spacious rooms on this floor, into all of which the public have free acess. Alas, all they contained when I visited in 2008 were a few photographs of Egypt. The photographs were very nice - good composition, interesting (if banal) subjects, good use of colour and lighting - but there were only half a dozen in each room and they are hardly what one expects in an archaeological museum.
The second floor was shut apart from two rooms which contained a collection of pre-historic artefacts from the area of Macedonia (so far as I could make out from the signs, which were all in Croatian apart from sparse translations for the actual objects: "Pre-historic Scraper - Krk" was the sort of thing.)
One or two were quite intriguing, like the pottery boxes - houses? - with humanoid figures instead of chimneys. Were they ossuaries or cinerary urns? Were they connected to burials at all? We shall never know. There was also a collection of stones carved to represent the female form divine between waist and knee, which indicated that the ancient inhabitants of Croatia were worshippers of Venus Callipygus in no uncertain manner. If the objects were to be believed, the ideal female of those days was as steatopygus as a Hottentot! A couple bore incised lines which may have been intended to represent tatoos or tribal markings.
The grand staircase took us up once more to the third floor, and here the real archaeological collection began. Turning to the left you were guided through four or five small rooms of Bronze and Iron Age Croatia, with collections of bronze socket axes and the stone moulds that had been used to produce them. There were vessels, swords, fibulae (ancient safety pins used as brooches), some of quite startling and impractical dimensions. Their only purpose can have been to advertise "Look, I'm rich enough to afford a really huge safety pin!"
More intriguing were the collections of jewellery from Iron Age tombs. There were conical bronze caps which must surely have been placed over cloth bonnets, there were ear-rings, bangles and bracelets, a variety of long bronze dress pins (like hat pins only longer and more deadly), and in one case a long cylinder of individual bracelets that must have gone around some woman's lower legs from ankle to knee. Either she was only about twelve when she died or the women of those times had exceedingly skinny legs!
The final part of the collection was two rooms filled with Egyptian objects: a couple of quite dull Books of the Dead, a fragment of a medical papyrus, another papyrus that held instructions on how to mummify a sacred bull - something that every housewife needs to know - and half a dozen wooden sarcophagii from the Greek period. The only object that stands out in my mind is a head of an Amarna princess (any female from that period was, unless there is an inscription to say otherwise, a princess) where the back of the head has been elongated to truly grotesque dimensions. A flight of artistic fancy or had the poor girl had her skull bound as a baby to produce the effect?
I was just about to leave, feeling that I had wasted 20 kuna which could have been more enjoyably spent on an icecream or a postcard of Zagreb cathedral, when I spotted a doorway into a darkened room. On the principle of leaving no stone unturned, I entered the room. A quick glance showed a rather wizened mummy lying in a glass case and a display board proudly announcing, "The Zagreb Mummy".
Mummies no longer impress me - I've seen too many in Egypt - and I took a quick turn around the room, just to say that I had seen everything. There was a small window in one wall giving onto a display of half a dozen objects that certainly were not Egyptian. I glanced at the bit of paper which named them and grinned sardondically: the objects were Etruscan. Obviously the museum authorities had a few Etruscan bits and pieces - from where? How? - and had stuck them in here for want of anywhere better to put them.
I turned to leave and as I did so my eye was caught by a large display board on the back wall of the room which also bore the word "Etruscan". Idly I went over to it and found that, alone of all the display boards in the museum, this one was in both Croatian and English. I began to read - and was electrified.
What I had taken to be a bit of uninteresting wall paper on the side wall of the room was, in fact, strips of linen - the "bandages" that had been used to wrap the mummy.
It is true that mummies have been known to conceal some quite exciting things, usually in the form of old papyrus wadded up and used to fill the body cavities from which the squishier bits have been removed. One thinks, for example, of the famous crocodiles of Oxyrhincus, which concealed a treasure trove of Gnostic literature. More recently (and reported in Diggings at the time) a mummy was found to contain long lost plays and works by some of the most famous of the ancient Greek authors.
This, time, however, it was the bandages that concealed the treasure - the longest Etruscan text in existence!
Apparently the Etruscans were in the habit of writing on sheets of linen, which were then folded for storage like a bedsheet. A few Etruscan tombs actually have depictions of these folded sheets, carefully placed by the head of the departed. Presumably the linen "books" contained instructions for the afterlife and were conveniently to hand in case the deceased needed a spot of quick advice to guide him through the Underworld.
Frustratingly, ancient Etruscan can be read, but not understood. It is based on the Greek alphabet, but written backwards. Scholars have been able to identify a number of names of gods and people and have picked up a few words such as "vinum", which would appear to be "wine". No bi-lingual text (like the Rosetta Stone) has been found so about all that we can say is that Etruscan does not appear to be related to Greek, Latin or Phoenician.
The Zagreb linen book had been cut up into strips, which have been lovingly reassembled into what the scholars believe is the right order. The letters are very faint but are beautifully formed; clearly whoever wrote the book was a professional scribe who knew what he was about. Scholars have been able to identify names of Etruscan gods and what they think are dates, so presumably the text is a calendar of religious festivals, possibly with instructions on how the festivals are to be celebrated.
Perhaps the greatest mystery of the book - apart from the meaning of its text - is the question of how and why it came to be in Egypt. Carbon-14 dating places it around 379 BC, a time when the Etruscans were fast being supplanted by the Romans. Was it taken there by some Etruscan refugee fleeing from Roman oppression? Was it stolen, perhaps from a tomb, and sold to Egypt solely for its value as cloth - which would be a bit like taking coals to Newcastle: Egypt had plenty of linen of its own?
Unfortunately we shall never know, but if you enjoy a good mystery and want to see for yourself something which is unique in the world - for there is no other example of such a long Etruscan text - I can heartily recommend the Zagreb Archaeological Museum. That 20 kuna was well spent!
© Kendall K. Down 2008
