Two bodies of gold text survive from the ancient Mediterranean and they are often mentioned in the same breath. One set was nailed to a temple where the public could read it. The other was folded small and buried with the dead, addressed to a reader who could no longer speak. Same material, opposite purposes.
Three plates found at an Etruscan port in the summer of 1964
Massimo Pallottino was excavating the sanctuary at Pyrgi, the port serving the Etruscan city of Caere on the Tyrrhenian coast, when three gold plates came up on 8 July 1964. The site is now Santa Severa. The plates date to around 500 BC, two of them inscribed in Etruscan and the third in Phoenician, and all three carry nail holes, so at some point they had been fixed to a door or a wall.
The text records a dedication by Thefarie Velianas, ruler of Caere, of a sacred place to Astarte, whom the Etruscan version identifies with the Etruscan goddess Uni. The Phoenician inscription is catalogued as KAI 277. All three plates are now in the Villa Giulia in Rome.
They are usually called an Etruscan Rosetta Stone, and the museum that holds them disagrees
The claim attached to these plates is that they gave scholars the same text in a language they already knew, and that Etruscan opened up as a result. That is not what happened, and the Villa Giulia says so plainly in its own description of them. The two texts do not correspond closely, both are short, and the comparison with the Rosetta Stone does not hold. They advanced the study of Etruscan. They did not decipher it.
The places where the versions part company are the most interesting thing about them. The Phoenician uses the root MLK, which denotes sole rule and is normally rendered as king. The Etruscan does not use lauχum, its own word for king. It uses zilac, meaning magistrate. Velianas is presented as one kind of ruler to a Phoenician-reading audience and another to an Etruscan one.
Pallottino read the whole document politically, as evidence of Carthaginian backing for a ruler in Caere at a point when Etruscan power at sea was slipping. Others have tied it to the early treaty between Rome and Carthage that Polybius describes and admits he can barely construe.
Thin leaves of gold, folded and placed in graves across seven centuries
The other body of material is entirely private. These are gold leaves, often only a few centimetres across, inscribed, folded and laid with a body. The earliest date to the late fifth century BC and the practice continues for roughly seven hundred years, with finds in southern Italy, Thessaly, Crete and Rome.
What is written on them is a set of directions. On arriving in the underworld the soul will see a spring to its left, beside a white cypress. It must not drink there, because that water brings forgetting. It should go instead to the water running from the lake of Memory, where guardians will block it and ask who it is. The soul is to answer that it is a child of Earth and starry Heaven, that it is dying of thirst, and to ask for the cold water. The guardians let it drink.
Scholars call these a Totenpass, a passport for the dead. The leaf from Hipponion, found in 1965 and dated to around 400 BC, runs to twenty-one lines of hexameter and is among the fullest. The one from Petelia in Calabria, found in the 1830s and in the British Museum since 1843, is the most quoted.
Not every tablet follows that script. The Thurii leaves open by declaring that the soul comes pure from the pure. Two found at Pelinna in Thessaly in 1987 instruct the dead person to tell Persephone that Bacchios released them, and to say they have died and been born on the same day.
The Pyrgi Gold Tablets, c. 500 BC. Three gold sheets bearing Etruscan and Phoenician dedicatory inscriptions, discovered at the sanctuary of Pyrgi and now preserved in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome. Pyrgi Gold Tablets, Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The tablets are called Orphic and none of them mentions Orpheus
The field is uneasy about the label. Radcliffe Edmonds put the word in quotation marks in the title of the volume he edited. Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston covered themselves by naming both traditions, Orpheus and the Bacchic gold tablets.
The reason is straightforward. Orpheus does not appear on any of them. What appears is Dionysus under the name Bacchios, along with Persephone, Eukles and Eubouleus, and the Hipponion text calls the initiates mystai and bakchoi. Whether that amounts to a coherent Orphic theology or to a looser family of mystery practices remains one of the livelier arguments in the study of Greek religion.
Why anyone writes on gold in the first place
For Pyrgi the answer is public and obvious. A dedication meant to be seen and to outlast the man who paid for it goes on the most durable and most conspicuous material available.
For the leaves in the graves the reasoning runs the other way. Gold does not corrode, and what the text promises is that the initiate will not either. The material is making the same argument the words make, to an audience of one.
One detail closes the point. The Petelia leaf was later fitted into a gold pendant case on a chain, manufactured roughly four centuries after the leaf itself. Someone in the Roman period was walking around with their instructions for the afterlife hanging at their throat.
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Sources: Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia on the Pyrgi tablets. Pallottino, M. (1964), Scavi nel santuario etrusco di Pyrgi. Graf, F., and Johnston, S.I. (2007), Ritual Texts for the Afterlife. Edmonds, R. (ed.) (2011), The ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets and Greek Religion. Bernabé, A., and Jiménez San Cristóbal, A.I. (2008), Instructions for the Netherworld. British Museum on the Petelia tablet.
Gold as the symbol of eternal life, rather intrigues me.
Etruscan gold artifacts, like the Pyrgi plates and Totenpass leaves, reveal ancient perceptions of gold as a sacred medium for divine communication and afterlife navigation. This contrasts with later Christian beliefs, which de-emphasized material wealth in favor of spiritual salvation.