The longest Etruscan text in existence, written on linen and then used to wrap an Egyptian mummy.
Zagreb’s archaeological museum is a solid regional collection with one genuinely world-class object in it, and the object arrived by accident.
The Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis
In 1848 a Croatian official named Mihajlo Barić, working in Hungary, resigned his post, travelled to Egypt, and bought a mummy as a souvenir. He brought it home to Vienna and stood it upright in the corner of his sitting room.
At some point he removed the linen wrappings and put them in a display case, having noticed writing on them but assuming it was Egyptian.
When Barić died, his brother — a priest in Slavonia — gave the whole thing to the state institute in Zagreb in 1867.
The writing was not Egyptian. It was Etruscan.
It is a linen book — a liber linteus, a format known from Roman sources but of which this is the only surviving example in the world — cut into strips and reused as mummy wrapping in Ptolemaic Egypt. It contains around 1,200 legible words and is by a wide margin the longest surviving text in the Etruscan language.
It appears to be a ritual calendar, listing ceremonies and the dates on which they should be performed. Etruscan is only partially understood — it is not Indo-European and has no close living relatives — so the text can be broadly characterised and not read continuously.
Nobody knows how an Etruscan liturgical book ended up in an Egyptian embalmer’s workshop.
The mummy is displayed alongside it. She was a woman named Nesi-hensu, wife of a tailor from Thebes, and her own funerary papyrus survives too. She has nothing to do with the Etruscans whatsoever.
The rest
The Vučedol Dove — a three-legged ceramic ritual vessel of about 2800 BC from the Vučedol culture on the Danube, and one of the emblems of Croatian prehistory. It may well be a partridge rather than a dove, which the museum now says.
The Roman collection, largely from Siscia and Andautonia, with good glass and stonework.
The numismatic cabinet, which is one of the more important in this part of Europe.
Egyptian, Greek and medieval sections.
Practical
Inexpensive, central, and rarely busy.
The building sits on Zrinjevac, the first and best square of the Green Horseshoe, and there is a pleasant courtyard with Roman stones and a café.
Two hours if you read properly, forty minutes if you have come for the Liber Linteus, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
More Museums
Museum of Broken Relationships
Objects donated by strangers, each with the story of the relationship it survived. Far better than it sounds.
Mimara Museum
A vast donated collection with a genuine question mark over how much of it is what it says it is.
Museum of Contemporary Art
The biggest museum in Croatia, across the river, with a working slide down the side of it.