It is one of the most important documents for the length of the text as well as for the number of words contained therein. It is a manuscript, found in Egypt on the bands of a mummy, and presently conserved in the National Museum of Zagreb (Croatia). It is also the only example of a book written on linen cloth (hence the Latin name Liber Linteus). Moreover, it is the only Etruscan book handed down to posterity. Originally it was a scroll which was brought to Egypt for unknown reasons. It was later cut into strips used to bandage the mummy of a woman, probably during the 1st century of our era. Putting the stripes the one near the other it was possible to reconstruct a part of the original manuscript, consisting of 230 lines of text and 1200 words that can be read more or less clearly, and 100 more words that can be reconstructed from the context with a high degree of certainty. The manuscript is a kind of religious calendar containing the indication of where and when the ceremonies had to take place, the concerned gods, the offerings to be made, etc.
In the years 1848-1849 the noble Slovenian Mihail de Baric, a rich officer of the Hungarian Royal Chancellor's Office, after retiring went to Egypt where he bought the mummy of a young woman. According to the "taste" of the time, the mummy was exposed for some years in the reception room of a Viennese palace. Probably it was de Baric himself who got the bands off the mummy: at his death in 1859, the mummy and its bands where exposed in two distinct show-cases. Pressure was brought to bear upon the brother of Mihail de Baric, Ilija Baric, thus he donated the mummy and its bands to the fund for the Yugoslav Academy. The mummy was then transferred from Vienna to Zagreb in 1862.
According to the studies of Francesco Roncalli, the original "book" -- written approx. in the second century BC -- was a single linen canvas, approx. 40 cm wide and approx. 3.40 m in length. The linen canvas was, as we can see in existing Etruscan sculptures, folded into twelve pages. Each page contained a column of text written in black ink with underlines and diacritic signs written in red ink. The codex was restored in 1985 under the supervision of Francesco Roncalli.
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