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Liber Linteus - Discovery

Liber Linteus - Discovery: Encyclopedia II - Liber Linteus - Discovery

Liber Linteus - Purchase of the mummy. In 1848, Mihajlo Barić (1791–1859), a Croatian minor official in the Hungarian Royal Chancellery, resigned his post and embarked upon a tour of several countries, including Egypt. While in Alexandria, he purchased a sarchophagus containing a female mummy, as a souvenir of his travels. Barić displayed the mummy at his home in Vienna, standing it upright in the corner of his sitting room. He often told his visitors that it was the body of King Stephen of Hungary's s ...

Liber Linteus: Encyclopedia II - Liber Linteus - Discovery

Liber Linteus - Discovery

Liber Linteus - Purchase of the mummy

In 1848, Mihajlo Barić (1791–1859), a Croatian minor official in the Hungarian Royal Chancellery, resigned his post and embarked upon a tour of several countries, including Egypt. While in Alexandria, he purchased a sarchophagus containing a female mummy, as a souvenir of his travels.

Barić displayed the mummy at his home in Vienna, standing it upright in the corner of his sitting room. He often told his visitors that it was the body of King Stephen of Hungary's sister. At some point he removed the linen wrappings and put them on display in a separate glass case, though he seems to have never realised either the writing or its importance.

The mummy remained on display at his home until his death in 1859, when it passed into the possession of his brother Ilija, a priest in Slavonia. He took no interest in the mummy, and, in 1867, donated it to the State Institute of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia in Zagreb (now the Archaeological Museum). Their catalogue described it as follows:

Mummy of a young woman (with wrappings removed) standing in a glass case and help upright by an iron rod. Another glass case contains the mummy's bandages which are completely covered with writing in an unknown and hitherto undeciphered language, representing an outstanding treasure of the National Museum.

Liber Linteus - Initial examinations

The mummy and its wrappings were examined the same year by the German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch, who noticed the text, but believed them to be Egyptian hieroglyphs. He did not undertake any further research on the text, until 1877, when a chance conversation with Richard Burton about runes made him realise that the writing was not Egyptian. They realised the text was potentially important, but wrongly concluded that it was a transliteration of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in the Arabic script.

In 1891, the wrappings were transported to Vienna, where they were thoroughly examined Jacob Krall, an expert on the Coptic language, who expected the writing to be either Coptic, Libyan or Carian. He was the first to identify the language as Etruscan and reassemble the strips. It was his work that established that these wrappings were a linen book written in Etruscan.