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A curse tablet (; ) is a small tablet with a curse written on it from the Greco-Roman world. Its name originated from the Greek and Latin words for "pierce" and "bind". The tablets were used to ask the gods, place spirits, or the deceased to perform an action on a person or object, or otherwise compel the subject of the curse.
The texts on curse tablets are typically addressed to infernal or liminal gods such as Pluto, Charon, Hecate, and Persephone, sometimes via the mediation of a dead person (probably the corpse in whose grave the tablet was deposited). Some texts do not invoke the gods, however, but merely list the targets of the curse, the crimes or conditions upon which the curse is valid, and/or the intended ill to befall them. Some tablets are inscribed with nothing more than the names of the targets, leading to the supposition that an oral spell may have accompanied the manufacture of the curse. The texts on the tablets were not always curses; tablets were also used to help the dead. Those at whose grave sites these were placed had usually died at a very young age or in a violent manner, and the tablet was supposed to help lay their souls to rest in spite of their untimely deaths. The language of those texts that do give context is often concerned with justice, either listing the target's crimes in great detail, handing over responsibility for their punishment to the gods, using indefinite grammar. Frequently, such curse tablets are also inscribed with additional, otherwise meaningless "curse" words such as Barbarous name, Barbarous name, or Barbarous name, seemingly in order to lend them a kind of supernatural efficacy. Many of those discovered at Athens refer to court cases and curse the opposing litigant, asking ("May he...") that he botch his performance in court, forget his words, become dizzy and so forth. Others include erotic binding-spells, and spells ranged against thieves, and business and sporting rivals. Those curse tablets targeted at thieves or other criminals may have been more public, and more acceptable; some scholars even refuse to apply the word "curse" to such "positive" texts, preferring expressions such as "judicial prayers".
In 1979/1980, the Bath curse tablets were found at the site of Aquae Sulis (now Bath in England). All but one of the 130 tablets concerned the restitution of stolen goods. Over 80 similar tablets have been discovered in and about the remains of a temple to Mercury nearby, at West Hill, Uley,. making south-western Britain one of the major centres for finds of Latin defixiones.
In Ancient Egypt, so-called "Execration texts" appear around the time of the 12th Dynasty, listing the names of enemies written on clay figurines or pottery which were then smashed and buried beneath a building under construction (so that they were symbolically "smothered"), or in a cemetery..
Scholars from antiquity, like Christian philosopher Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200 CE), believed that human language was not appropriate for addressing the gods. Therefore, some of the inscriptions of these curse tablets are not easily translatable, because they were "invocations and secret names" which would only be understood by the spirits themselves. Another possibility is that curse tablets were produced by professionals who wished to lend their art a degree of mystique through the use of an apparently secret language that only they could understand. In support of this theory, at least some tablets appear to have blank spaces instead of a name for the target, suggesting they were prepared in advance, and that the desired target's name would be added on behalf of the customer.
The element of mystique was given through a number of ways along with voces mysticae. Professionals and laypeople alike would utilize as well as boustrophedon. Pictures and charakteres gave further allure to the tablets, and occasionally specific formulae would be used and reused to relay a specifically intended tone. There were also frequent invocations of Egyptian gods and goddesses, archangels, and other biblical figures as a result of the syncretism that occurred over time throughout the Mediterranean.
The first set of curse tablets to be discovered came from the city of Selinunte in Sicily. A total of twenty-two tablets were found, mostly coming from the early fifth century, and directed toward someone that the user was suing.see Ankarloo, Bengt. p. ??? While the ancient Greeks may have feared the power of these tablets, some historians have compared the tablets to modern Profanity, arguing that they were produced in a fit of anger, in envy towards a business competitor or athletic opponent, or in an unhealthy obsession toward a person of romantic interest.
When research first began on the topic of curse tablets, there was serious doubt that these types of artifacts truly came from ancient Greek society. E. R. Dodds, a professor of Greek at Oxford, was one of the first scholars to begin studying the topic of magic or superstition in ancient Greece,see Green, Peter. p. 44 and others such as Peter Green have also studied this aspect of ancient Greek society.
There is also debate over the type of women that men were trying to attract with these spells. Some scholars subscribe to the idea of men trying to make fair, chaste women become filled with desire for them, while others argue that men were trying to control women whom they thought to be sexually active for their own personal benefit.see Dickie, Matthew W. pg. 568 Christopher A. Faraone considered the spells to fall into two distinct categories; spells used for inducing passion and spells used for encouraging affection.See Faraone, C.A. pg. ix Men, according to Faraone, were the primary users of the passion-inducing spells, while women were the main users of the affection spells.
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