A collection of 2,400-year-old lead tablets etched with poison-tongued curses were found in the grave of a young Athenian woman in Greece. Hateful calamities are bestowed on two Athenian couples, all of them tavern keepers, as chthonic mythological forces from the Underworld are conjured through the inscriptions on the four tablets. The fifth tablet was blank and believed to have had an incantation that was recited.
Archeologists of Greece’s Ephorate for Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities originally excavated the northeast Piraeus in 2003. Now, Jessica Lamont of the John Hopkins University in Baltimore examined the tablets anew and published her findings in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. She says that the iron nails piercing all five tablets deposited in the grave seal the fate of the two couples.
“The physical act of hammering a nail into the lead tablet would have ritually echoed (a) wished-for sentiment,” she writes.
The curses themselves leave little to the imagination. One of the curses targeting two of the tavern owners states: “Cast your hate upon Phanagoras and Demetrios and their tavern and their property and their possessions. I will bind my enemies Demetrios and Phanagoras, in blood and ashes, with all the dead… I will bind you in such a bind, Demetrios, as strong as is possible and I will smite down a kynotos (dog’s ear) on your tongue.”
A kynotos was the lowest possible roll that could have been achieved when casting dice, suggesting that gambling was rife in taverns. The unlucky roll for Demetrios would have meant the economic failure of his business. The writing of the curse was neat and eloquent, suggesting that a professional scribe may have been hired to create the tablets.
The young girl occupying the grave may have had nothing to do with the curse, says Lamont. It was believed in Ancient Greece that the curse tablets would only reach the Underworld if buried underground in a well or a grave. Greek funerary areas were convenient places to ensure that the curses reached the ears of entities that would enact them.
