Tiur, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

Tiur was the Etruscan moon-deity, the companion or counterpart of Usil the sun. Whether Tiur was male or female is uncertain — the Etruscan inscriptions are ambiguous, and the iconographic evidence is scant — but the function is clear: Tiur was the personified moon, the divine power of the lunar cycle, the timekeeper of the months. The Etruscan word for 'month' was tiur, the same word as the deity's name; so the moon and the month were linguistically and theologically one, just as Latin mensis and Greek mēn preserve the same root in the parallel words.

The Etruscan calendar was lunar, with months marked by the new moon, and Tiur's appearances regulated the religious year. The Liber Linteus — the great surviving Etruscan religious calendar, preserved on the linen wrappings of an Egyptian mummy now at Zagreb — is organized around the months of the year, each with its proper rites; Tiur as the moon-deity oversaw this entire annual cycle, providing the basic rhythm of religious time.

On the Piacenza Liver, Tiur occupies a region in the lower (chthonic) hemisphere of the bronze model — perhaps reflecting the Etruscan understanding of the moon as a deity who descended below the earth at the dark of the moon, only to be reborn at the new moon's first crescent. The descent and return of the moon was a regular sacred event in the Etruscan calendar, marked by appropriate ceremonies of mourning at the disappearance and rejoicing at the renewal.

Of Tiur's personal mythology — stories of Tiur as protagonist — almost nothing survives. The deity is known to us as a calendar-marker and a region on the divinatory liver, but no narrative myth has come down. After the Romanization, Tiur was identified with Roman Luna and disappeared as a distinct figure.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

Tiur is named on the Piacenza Liver. The word tiur 'month' is well-attested in Etruscan inscriptions (notably on the Liber Linteus and the Tabula Capuana). The Liber Linteus is preserved at the Zagreb Archaeological Museum; the standard edition is van der Meer's The Bronze Liver of Piacenza (1987) for the Liver and his Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis (2007) for the linen book. The lunar calendar is reconstructed in de Grummond, Etruscan Myth, chapter 5, and in Jean MacIntosh Turfa's Divining the Etruscan World (2012). The gender ambiguity of Tiur is discussed in Cristofani's Dizionario.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Companion ofUsilTiur was the Etruscan moon-deity, the companion or counterpart of Usil the sun

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for The Powers of the Sun, Moon and Earth. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

c. 900–750 BCE: Villanovan communities establish the Iron Age background from which historically Etruscan cities emerge.
c. 750–600 BCE: Orientalizing exchange and urban growth transform elite ritual, iconography, writing, and sanctuary display.
c. 600–475 BCE: Etruscan city-states reach their widest political and artistic influence; temples and mythic imagery proliferate.
c. 474 BCE: The defeat at Cumae marks changing Etruscan power in Campania and the Tyrrhenian world.
5th–4th centuries BCE: Tomb painting, mirrors, votive deposits, and regional cults provide dense evidence for divine and funerary imagery.
396–264 BCE: Roman conquest progressively incorporates Etruscan cities while Etruscan priestly expertise remains prestigious.
2nd–1st centuries BCE: Late inscriptions and Roman antiquarian interest document cultural integration and the persistence of divinatory traditions.
1st century BCE–1st century CE: Cicero, Varro, Livy, Seneca, and others preserve testimony about haruspicy, lightning, and prodigies.