Menrva was the Etruscan goddess of wisdom, of warfare, and of the crafts — the figure equivalent to the Greek Athena and the Roman Minerva, with the Etruscan form being older than the Roman by some centuries. (The Roman Minerva, indeed, came to Rome through Etruscan mediation, with the very name being Etruscan in origin: Menrva became Minerva when adopted into Latin.) She was depicted as a tall, helmeted maiden, holding a spear and a shield, sometimes with a winged victory standing on her hand; her aegis bore the head of the Gorgon, just as the Greek Athena's did, in a clear sign of Greek mythological influence.
Yet Menrva had distinctive Etruscan features. She was particularly associated with prophecy and divination — more so than the Greek Athena — and presided over a number of oracular shrines in Etruria. She was depicted on mirrors interpreting omens for kings, conducting rites of divination over the entrails of sacrificed animals, and instructing heroes in the proper rites by which the future could be discerned. The connection with the disciplina etrusca, the elaborate science of divination by which the Etruscans were famous throughout the Mediterranean, was strong; in some sources Menrva was reckoned the divine patroness of the haruspices, the priests who read the future from the livers of sacrificial sheep.
She was also the goddess of childbirth — a function the Greek Athena had relinquished. The Etruscans depicted her on mirrors superintending the birth of children to her favored mothers, and the great terracotta sculpture from the Belvedere temple at Orvieto shows her receiving the infant Maris (the Etruscan Mars) from his mother. So the goddess of wisdom was also the goddess of those critical and dangerous moments in human life — the moment of birth, the moment of war, the moment of decision before an oracle — at which the help of a wise patroness was needed.
Menrva was the third member of the Etruscan civic triad, along with Tinia and Uni, and her cult was a regular part of Etruscan public religion. After the Capitoline temple at Rome was built by the Tarquinian kings, she became one of the three deities of the Roman state — Iuppiter, Iuno, and Minerva, the Capitoline triad — and through this incorporation she passed into the Roman imagination as Minerva and from there into the inheritance of Western civilization. Her transformation from the Etruscan Menrva to the Roman Minerva to the medieval Christian-allegorical figure of Wisdom (sapientia) traces a continuous line.
