Discovery of bronzes rewrites Italy's Etruscan-Roman history

L'Umbria is one of my (multiple) pending places to visit in Italy, and that's right in the border. I'll write that down just in case :)

A find like this will not leave you back to zero - you'll run conferences on the find alone for decades, and then there is all the work to examine and exhibit the findings.

These events can be life-changing.

Yeah exciting time! Can’t wait to see them clean!

In Egypt anything is possible if you know the right people, and give them enough money.

I have read that Greek physicians practiced human dissection, but that this practice was banned by Rome. Perhaps the Etruscans practiced it, or Roman physicians did despite the bans, or during periods when it wasn't banned.

FWIW, the article claims the bronze organs were used as votive offerings. This seems like the sort of practice that may have evolved as a replacement to earlier human sacrifice, with real organs being removed and used as offerings, which would give those people the experience needed to create anatomically accurate sculptures of human organs.

I don't think many soldiers are anatomy experts. Chopping somebody up in combat is different than taking a body apart piece by piece and studying the way the organs are.

Accurate knowledge of human anatomy in the modern era can be credited to the sometimes clandestine dissection of cadavers by doctors and other medical researchers, not the armies who merely chopped people up.

A single find could easily rewrite history. But this isn't the royal library of Ashurbanipal (wikipedia: "the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal is a collection of more than 30,000 clay tablets and fragments containing texts of all kinds from the 7th century BC"). [And it's not just a fancy name - this was actually a royal library which was the beneficiary of a lot of royal effort to collect all kinds of significant texts.]

This is a bunch of statues and votive offerings of models of body parts. There is apparently no text, and if there were text we probably couldn't read it. This find has no hope of rewriting history.

I believe it’s literally true in this case. There just isn’t much Etruscan art known compared to Roman art

It happens all the time afaik, for some eras/civilisations artefacts are so rare and far apart that sometimes all it takes is a random skull / art piece / tool to completely break past assumptions. Watching history documentaries make people think we have a pretty good idea of all the events and their respective timelines but for the vast majority of history we have absolutely no fucking idea what was going on

Things like that for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schöningen_spears

> The spears and the place of discovery revolutionized the picture of the cultural and social development of early humans. Previously, Middle Pleistocene hominins, whether Homo heidelbergensis or early Neanderthals, were regarded as simple beings without language who acquired meat by scavenging other carnivore kills or natural deaths. The spears and their correlated finds are evidence of complex technological skills and are the first direct evidence that these humans hunted their prey. The large and swift prey that the Schöningen humans butchered suggests that their technologies and hunting strategies were sophisticated, that they had complex social structures, and had developed some form of communication (language ability). The Schöningen humans therefore likely had cognitive skills such as anticipatory planning, thinking, and acting, some of which had only previously been attributed to modern humans.[46][47] In addition, the spears have played a major role in debates about the origins of throwing.