Fascinating and provocative!
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Subject: [JFRR] Language and Ritual in Sabellic Italy: The Ritual Complex of the Third and Fourth Tabulae Iguvinae (Weiss, Michael)

Language and Ritual in Sabellic Italy: The Ritual Complex of the
Third and Fourth Tabulae Iguvinae. By Michael Weiss. 2010. Leiden:
Brill Academic Publishers. 511 pages. ISBN: 978-90-04-17789-5 (hard
cover).

Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Indiana University
([log in to unmask]).

[Word count: 410 words]

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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Read this review on-line at:

http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=1247

(All JFR Reviews are permanently stored on-line at

http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/reviews.php)

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