Casting Hate: Greek Curse Tablets found in 2,400-Year-Old Grave

A recent study of the writing on four lead tablets shows the importance of staying on your neighbors’ good side in ancient Greece. The artifacts are “curse tablets”, and were created to send bad luck or negative energy the way of four, or perhaps five, sets of tavern keepers who may have upset their rivals.

The lead tablets were found in 2003 in a grave along with the cremated remains of a young woman who lived in Athens, Greece 2,400 years ago. Live Science reports that “details of the burial have not yet been published.” However, the dead woman may not have been the writer of the curses anyway.

Jessica Lamont, an instructor at John Hopkins University in Baltimore and author of the article “A New Commercial Curse Tablet from Classical Athens”, which was published in the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, told Live Science: “The way that curse tablets work is that they're meant to be deposited in an underground location such as a grave or well. It's thought that these subterranean places provided a conduit through which the curses could have reached the underworld.”

Thus, the woman’s death may have simply provided the one who was angered by the tavern keepers with easy access to send his/her bad wishes to the chthonic gods, who would then do the curse's biddings. Lamont believes that the style of the curses and the nature of the recipients suggests that “commercial rivalry” was the motive.