Uni

author: High Priest Zevios Metathronos
author: Karnonnos

Hieratic Information about Uni

Divine Symbols
The Offered Breast The Pomegranate Branch The Diadem The Thunderbolt The Bridal Veil

I. The Name

The etymology of Uni is known in direction, if not necessarily in sense. James Clackson and Geoffrey Horrocks placed the name among a small group of Etruscan theonyms taken over from the neighboring Italic languages, together with Menerva and Nethuns, and derive it from Latin or Sabellian Iuno. The transfer runs into Etruscan, which unsettles the older assumption that Rome received the name of its queen of the gods from Etruria along with so much else of its public religion.¹

The Etruscan forms are uni in the nominative and unial in the genitive. The earliest securely dated objects to carry the name are the three gold tablets from the sanctuary at Pyrgi, the seaward sanctuary of Caere, placed at about 510 BCE and recovered in 1964. Two are inscribed in Etruscan and the third in Phoenician. Jacques Heurgon read in the longer Etruscan leaf the compound unial astres, "of Uni-Astarte," while the Phoenician leaf, catalogued as KAI 277, opens with a dedication to the Lady, to Astarte.^2,3,4

An earlier attestation may exist. A sandstone stele recovered in 2015 from the foundations of the Late Archaic temple at Poggio Colla, near Vicchio in the Mugello, carries one of the longest Etruscan sacred texts known on stone. Adriano Maggiani dated its letter forms to between 525 and 510 BCE and identified, in a preliminary reading, the names of Tinia, the sovereign sky god, and of Uni. He published the reading as provisional and it remains so.^5,6

Language	Name	Earliest Secure Attestation
Etruscan	Uni	Gold tablets from Pyrgi, c. 510 BCE
Phoenician	Uni-Astarte	Phoenician gold tablet from Pyrgi, KAI 277, c. 510 BCE

Sources: Heurgon for the Etruscan texts and the reading unial astres;² Schmitz for the Phoenician dedication;³ the Villa Giulia record for the find and the date;⁴ Clackson and Horrocks for the Latin form.¹

II. Greek Myth in Etruscan Art

The Adoption of Hercle

A bronze mirror from Volterra, engraved around 300 BCE, shows Uni seated and giving her breast to Hercle, the Etruscan Herakles, who is here no infant but a grown and bearded man. Tinia stands by and points to a tablet. The tablet is inscribed eca sren tva iχnac hercle unial clan θrasce. Larissa Bonfante reads the line as a caption written for the viewer, declaring that Hercle became the son of Uni.⁷

Eva Fiesel examined the same tablet in 1936 and treated it as legend rather than as speech assigned to a figure. The mirror explains itself in the same way very few Etruscan objects tend to do.⁸

Greek myth supplied the antecedent concept as Diodorus Siculus reported that Hera suckled the infant Herakles after Athena contrived to lay him at her breast, and that she flung the child away on learning who he was, with the spurt of milk creating the Milky Way. The Etruscan version keeps the milk but it seems like it discarded the deception. Experts in Etruscan culture like Nancy de Grummond treats the adoption of a grown hero by a willing goddess as an Etruscan development and reads the act as admission to the company of the gods. Nonetheless, it is possible this is a development of a strand from Greek vases.^9,10

The Judgement of Elcsntre

Uni also entered the Etruscan retelling of the contest of the three goddesses. On mirrors the shepherd prince appears as Elcsntre, led by Turms, the Etruscan Hermes, and the competitors are Menrva (Athena), Turan (Aphrodite) and Uni. Hyginus preserved the Latin form of the story, in which Paris awards the prize to Venus after the three are submitted to his judgement.¹¹

The Etruscan images depart from the Greek precisely at Uni. De Grummond observes that she appears on some mirrors unclothed and on others fully dressed and holding a branch of pomegranate bearing three fruits. Neither corresponds to the fully clothed sovereignty (other than some variations of Herakles suckling on her breast) that Hera offers in the Greek accounts. What Uni is shown as on these mirrors is stated in no surviving text. The pomegranate is preserved.^10,12

III. In the Rite of Uni

The name of Uni belongs to the technical apparatus of Etruscan divination. The bronze model of a sheep's liver found near Gossolengo carries the inscription uni mae in one compartment of its outer rim. L. Bouke van der Meer read those compartments as the houses of the Gods within the celestial templum and placed Uni among them.¹³

Natalie Stevens assigned Uni to region four of that scheme and tied the assignment to the ground. Temples of Uni are commonly found facing southwest and temples of Tinia facing south, where Greek temples look east almost without exception. Stevens proposed a heaven that rotated with the seasons, which would account for sanctuaries sitting two regions away from the position a fixed reading demands.¹⁴

The Pyrgi tablets carry evidence of the other kind, the prescriptive. The shorter Etruscan leaf sets out observances to be repeated year by year, and the longer text binds the dedication to a named month and to the third year of the dedicator's rule. Heurgon read its closing formula as a wish that the offerings of the sanctuary should endure as long as the stars.²

Divination and calendar hold the name securely. Whatever her priests said over her image is gone.^2,13

IV. Sites of Worship

Four places name Uni in writing found in or beneath a sanctuary of hers. These are the secure cases and they deserve separation from the many sites where a cult of women or of childbirth has been assigned to her by inference alone. The four span two centuries and reach from the Tyrrhenian coast to the Apennine foothills.

Pyrgi

The suburban sanctuary of Pyrgi lay on the coast below Caere and reached its greatest extent around 510 BCE. Temple B, the earlier of its two monumental buildings, was raised by Thefarie Velianas and dedicated to Uni under her Phoenician equivalent. Its plan was Greek, a single cella with columns on every side. Beside it stood the small precinct C and a long block of twenty rooms whose occupants Roman writers later remembered with contempt.^4,15

The votive record agrees with the epigraphic one. Jean MacIntosh Turfa counted several hundred dedications from the sanctuary along with animal bone from sacrifice, and noted vessels given by a member of the Spurina family recording vows to Uni beside Tinia and Thesan, the goddess of dawn, all three named on the vessels themselves.¹⁶

Pyrgi documents Uni as the deity of a state sanctuary at the seaward edge of a great city, honoured in a foreign name for the benefit of foreign traders and in her own name for the benefit of her own.

Kainua

Marzabotto, the Etruscan city in the Apennine foothills whose ancient name Kainua survives in the locative kainuathi written on pottery from the site, holds the clearest architectural evidence for the pairing of Uni with Tinia. Excavations directed by Elisabetta Govi in 2014 and 2015 uncovered a Tuscanic temple in Regio I, dated to the closing decades of the sixth century BCE, standing a short distance from the later peripteral temple of Tinia and divided from it by a single narrow street. Inscribed pottery from each building identifies the deity who owned it.^17,18

A fragment of inscription recovered from among the stones of the temple's foundation wall records its consecration by the spura, the civic body of Kainua. Govi reads the north-eastern quarter of the city as a deliberate transcription of the seats of the Gods onto the ground, with the sites of Uni and Tinia adjacent, as the discipline required. Her temple came first and the city grew northward around it.¹⁷

Gravisca

At Gravisca, the port of Tarquinia, Uni held a room of her own inside a sanctuary shared with Greek and Etruscan gods from the sixth century BCE onward. Denise Demetriou has set out its contents. The room assigned to Uni yielded 145 votive uteri and 22 swaddled infants; the neighbouring room of Turan yielded 74 uteri and two infants. Each room held two votive breasts.¹⁹

The two goddesses received the same kinds of gift in sharply different proportions. Childbirth belonged to Uni at Gravisca in a way it did not belong to Turan.¹⁹

Poggio Colla

The hilltop sanctuary at Poggio Colla commanded the junction of the Mugello basin with the valley of the Sieve. In the final season of excavation, Gregory Warden recovered the inscribed stele from the temple foundations in a context he describes as secure and as belonging to the phase that preceded stone architecture on the hill. Weaving equipment, gold ornament and dedications made by women accumulate across the site, and the focus of the cult was a fissure in the ground given ritual treatment after the temple was destroyed.⁶

If Maggiani's reading holds, Poggio Colla gives Uni a sanctuary far to the north of the great coastal cities, and gives it to her early.⁵

Vulci and the Limits of Attribution

The sanctuary at Fontanile di Legnisina near Vulci appears in some accounts as a temple of Uni, and Stevens uses it to test her reconstruction of the Etruscan heaven.¹⁴ Laura Ricciardi's report on the monumental altar and the votive deposit has described in it a mass of votive uteri, and the inscribed example among them names Vei, a goddess absent from the Liver of Piacenza and from the ancient authors and recovered only through excavation in the 1980s.^20,21

The confusion is instructive. A sanctuary of childbirth in southern Etruria is not by that fact a sanctuary of Uni.

V. Objects and Places of Found Objects

Object	Date	Ancient Provenance	Present Collection	Status of Identification
Three gold tablets	c. 510 BCE	Sanctuary at Pyrgi, doorframe of Temple B	Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome	Securely named unial astres
Vicchio stele	c. 525–510 BCE	Poggio Colla, foundations of the Late Archaic temple	Under conservation in Florence	Preliminary reading of the name; provisional
Bronze mirror with Hercle at the breast	c. 300 BCE	Volterra	Not specified in the sources cited here	Securely named unial
Bronze Liver of Piacenza	Late second or early first century BCE	Found near Gossolengo in 1877	Musei Civici di Palazzo Farnese, Piacenza	One compartment inscribed uni mae
Inscribed pottery from the Tuscanic temple	Late sixth to fifth century BCE	Marzabotto, Regio I	Museo Nazionale Etrusco "Pompeo Aria", Marzabotto	Identifies the deity of the building
Anatomical votives from the room of Uni	Sixth century BCE onward	Gravisca, southern sanctuary	Not specified in the sources cited here	Assigned to Uni by the epigraphy of the sanctuary

Sources: Heurgon and the Villa Giulia record for the gold tablets;^2,4 Maggiani and Warden for the Vicchio stele;^5,6 Bonfante and Fiesel for the Volterra mirror;^7,8 van der Meer and the City of Piacenza for the bronze liver;^13,22 Govi and her collaborators for Marzabotto;^17,18 Demetriou for Gravisca.¹⁹

The Gold Tablets

The three leaves were thin enough to be nailed to woodwork and were taken down and buried rather than melted. The Villa Giulia record notes that they had been fixed to the doorframe of Temple B before their deposition. They were found together in the sanctuary in 1964.⁴

Their value to Etruscology lies in the pairing of languages. The Phoenician text is not a translation of the Etruscan in any strict sense. Philip Schmitz has shown that its dialect and formulae belong to the western Phoenician world rather than to the homeland. Heurgon treated the dedication as a political document as much as a religious one, a ruler of Caere advertising a goddess whom Punic merchants would recognise at sight.^2,3

VI. Uni, Juno and the Aventine

The Direction of the Name

Latin Iuno and Etruscan uni are the same word, and the linguistic evidence sends it westward into Etruria rather than eastward into Latium.¹ This clears up less than it appears to. A borrowed name may travel without its cult, and a cult may travel without its name.

The Statue from Veii

Livy reported that in 396 BCE, on the eve of the fall of Veii, the dictator Marcus Furius Camillus prayed to the Juno who then dwelt in that city and promised her a temple in Rome worthy of her greatness. When the city fell, young soldiers were sent to lift her image. One of them asked the goddess whether she wished to go to Rome; the rest cried that she had nodded, and a later version of the story had her answer aloud. Livy himself recorded only that the statue proved light and easy to move, as though it followed of its own will. It was carried to the Aventine and Camillus dedicated there the temple he had vowed.²³

Plutarch was descriptive of the same episode with the ritual placed in the hands of Camillus rather than of the soldiers, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Valerius Maximus preserve further versions of the removal of the wooden image. Platner and Ashby collect the topographical evidence as they stated the temple was vowed in 396 and dedicated in 392, it housed the statue brought from Veii, it received expiatory offerings on several later occasions, and then the emperor Augustus restored it.^24,25,26,27

Roman writers call her Iuno Regina and Roman scholarship has long identified her with Uni. No Etruscan inscription from Veii names the goddess. The identification rests on the Roman account together with the general equivalence of the two names. This is the ordinary condition of Etruscan religion because the evidence that survives is Roman.²³

The Triad

Vitruvius prescribed that ground be set aside for Jupiter, Juno and Minerva on the highest point of a town, from which the greatest part of the walls may be seen. Inez Scott Ryberg asked whether that grouping was Etruscan or Italic in origin and found the question harder to answer than the confident textbooks allowed. The Etruscan ground offers a pair rather than a group of three. At Kainua the temples of Uni and Tinia stand adjacent in the sacred quarter. Menrva however is not among them.^17,28,29