History of the Liber Linteus ©Z

The Discovery

The facts, on the basis of which we can reconstruct the story about the mummy and its bandages, go back to the years 1848/49, when Mihael Baric (1791-1859) visited Egypt or "Misir", as he called it. In the revolutionary year of 1848 he resigned from his position of a secretary in the Austro-Hungarian Royal Chancellery and went to visit a few countries, amongst which Egypt, where he stayed for some time. Under not very clear circumstances, he came into contact with a mummy, probably via the grave robbers and antique traders in Alexandria (Bibl. [5]). Being a rich person, it was not difficult for him to buy the mummy, and transport it to his home in Vienna, in the former Fleischmarkt Street No. 28. Here, he lived the rest of his life, caring for his mummy and other art collections. Much later, his niece Th. Jellinek recollected, that the mummy was standing upright, fastened to an iron-ware in its showcase furnished with a curtain, still fully wrapped in its bandages, apart from the head, which was released of its wrappings and visible. When Baric died in 1859, two showcases were found in his inheritance, one containing a mummy - bare, and an other containing the separate bandages. This is how we know that Baric, possibly in the last year of his life, removed the linen bandages.

What happened next is documented in various archive papers. Many people, even prominent cultural and political personalities were involved into the transfer of the mummy from Vienna to Zagreb. Two years after Mihael Baric's death, his brother Ilija announced that he was the executor of the will of the deceased, and that according to the will he is donating the mummy either to the South Slav Academy of Sciences and Arts, or to the National Museum in Zagreb (at that time the Academy did not formally exist yet). In 1862 the Economic Committee of the South Slav Academy of Sciences and Arts made a decision, to set aside 100 Forints as a transport expenditure. Ivan Mazuranic, who was the president of the Court Chancellery, organized the transportation by train from Vienna to Zidani Most (railway in Croatia did not exist at that time), and by roads to Zagreb, where the chests were deposited in the Draskovic Building in downtown Zagreb. Here the mummy and its bands came under the supervision of Sabljar, who was the first person to catalogize them. Sabljar's successor was Sime Ljubic, who in 1871 became the curator of the Museum, and he was the first professionally educated classical archaeologist of this institution: it was his idea to put the Egypt collection in order. He invited the famous German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch, who was the first person to notice the series of - at that time unknown to him - signs written on the bandages.

The Investigation

The second scientist to see the bandages was the Englishman Richard Burton, world traveler and Orientalist, British Consul in Trieste, also a friend and donator of the Museum in Zagreb. After seeing the mummy and the bandages, in 1877 he sent the British Vice Consul in Trieste, Phillip Proby Cautley, to Zagreb. Burton thought, that the script of the bandages were runic and published his findings in the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom in London in 1879. In this way the Liber Linteus from Zagreb was for the first time presented to the scientists of the whole world.

It was from Burton, that the idea of the 'Etruscan (Nabathaean?) Book of the Dead' has erroneously risen, which is visible from his letter: (Bibl. [1] p.8)¹

'Travelling to Alexandria in October, 1877, with Dr. Heinrich Brugsch-Bey, I showed him my letter to the Athenaeum (7. April 1877); and that distinguished Egyptologist at once recognised several of the forms. In 1867-1868 happening to be at Agram, he was induced, little expecting that a new alphabet would be the result, to unroll an unopened mummy belonging to the Museum. Its date appeared to be 700-500 years, B. C.; and he was not a little surprised to find the swathed, some of them 20 feet long, covered not with hieroglyphs, but with characters partly Graeco-European (?) and partly Runic; at any rate non-Egyptian. The writing was divided, by regular lacunae, into what appeared to be chapters, each consisting of 10-20 lines, and the whole would make about 60 octavo pages. We could not help suspecting that he had found a translation of the Todtenbuch from Egyptian into some Arabic (Nabathaean?) tongue.'

Link to Krall's publication 1892 (Bibl.[1])

Around 1870 the best photographer of the time in Croatia, Ivan Standl was asked to make photo documents of the bandages, but the results weren't successful. At last, in 1891 the linen book was sent to Vienna to the famous Egyptologist professor Jacob Krall, where it stayed to one year deposited with utmost care in the University Library. This resulted in the so far most extensive examination and study, of this, as he has found out, Etruscan text, longest ever preserved inscription in this language. His study under the name: Die etruskischen Mumienbinden des Agramer National Museums in Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Philosophisch-historische Classe, no. 41 published in 1892 is a capital scientific work, which even today has fundamental significance in the study either of the linen book, or the Etruscan language generally. At that occasion, the bandages were orthocromatically photographed by Eder, achieving much better results than Standl. The chemical analysis of the linen and the ink was done by Wiesner, and of the hair of the mummy by Ebner. Krall's achievement was also the reconstruction of the positions of the band pieces into five long fragmented stripes.

After Krall's analysis, many books were published, some with serious scientific pretensions, others on the edge of science fiction. From that time on, the interest for the bandages increased, many scientist paid their visits to see them "in real". A person, who has contributed to a new discovery, was the Etruscologist Herbig, who in 1911 during restoration works accidentally discovered a new fragment of the written band, bundled together with the unwritten bandages, which is now called after him. This "new" fragment was sent to the Institute of Chemistry, Pharmacology and Physiology at the University in Rostock, to prof. Dr. Rudolph Robert, where it was found that the bandages were polluted not only by balm resin, but also by harmful iron oxide, which needed to be removed. Before a decision could be made, in 1914 the War broke out.

During 1932 the first attempts were made to use infrared photography, for recovering the unreadable parts. The results were successful, so in 1934 Ivan Plotnikov made a series of photos which covered 90 lines out of 245; this improved greatly the readability of dark and hard-to-see parts of the text. Another initiative was undertaken by Vetter from Vienna in 1940.

The Liber Linteus was the first time exhibited for public in 1936. During WW2 the bands were deposited in a safe. After the war they were transferred to the Museum building at Zrinski Trg No. 19, where it is still kept even today. The mummy is permanently exhibited, but the bands are kept in a safe and are only rarely given to interested experts to see.

At the end of 1966 all of the bandages were again subjected to infrared photography in black-and-white, by Ivan Lukan, photographer of the Bureau for Criminalistic Investigations. The result of this is a series of 86 shots accessible to interested investigators, together with a short editorial about the mummy and the bandages written by Ivica Degmedzic, Curator of the Museum. This set of photos stirred up a great interest among the experts from the whole world, and was used as a base to make a successful faximile-reconstruction of the linen book, which the author, Ramiza Pfleger kindly donated to the Museum.

In 1985 the bandages were moved from Zagreb to Riggisberg (near Bern in Swiss) to the laboratory which works within the Abbeg Foundation (Abbeg-Stiftung) for restoration works. This was preceded by a propedeutic analysis to find out the condition of the preservation of the linen, composition of the ink - black and red - used for writing the text, and the type of glue used for fixing the linen to the gauze. All this was done in the Central Laboratory for the Investigation of Artistic and Scientific Objects (Central Laboratorium voor Onderzoek van Voorwerpen van Kunst en Wettenschap) in Amsterdam in Netherland. Before that in the Center for Electronics, Diagnostics and Technology in Florense, a series of colour pictures had been taken in different light conditions - normal photography, infrared and ultraviolet. The best results were obtained by infrared photography, because on these pictures the letters appear very clearly. The copying of the whole text of the bands has been accomplished by Roncalli and Buttner in the laboratory in Riggisberg. The preservation work has been done in Laboratory Mechtild by Flury-Lemberg.