But the criticism did not ebb, and Pericles was attacked both by satirists and in the general assembly. Each ingot weighs 155 pounds and reads, IMPeratoris HADRIANI AUGusti[property of] Emperor Hadrian Augustus. 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. Negotiating the Archive(s) of UK Web Space, ORA workshop: discovery and digital curation of scholarly output, Online Presence: Raising your academic profile, Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform, Oxford-Illinois Digital Libraries Placement Programme - Project Presentations, Pipedream to Project: planning digital research projects in the humanities, REF, impact and Open Educational Resources, Reborn Digital: text, transmission, and technology, Reproducible Research Oxford Software Carpentry bootcamp, Research SeminarDigital representations of manuscript provenance: reconstructing the history of the Phillipps collection, Research SeminarSongs of Data: An introduction to sonification, Research Skills Toolkit for Humanities Division, Research Uncovered: Alistair Paterson on Visualizing Australian Rock Art and Archaeological Heritage, Research UncoveredA Linked Open Data Buddhist Text Archive, Research UncoveredA rock and a hard place: creating the Online Corpus of Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia, Research UncoveredAndrew Hankinson on searchable music notation, Research UncoveredCabiNET: Integrating Text and Object in Oxford Teaching, Research UncoveredChristine Borgman on Data, Scholarship, and Libraries, Research UncoveredCrowdsourcing and Humanities Research, Research UncoveredDavid De Roure on Ada Lovelace, Numbers, and Notes, Research UncoveredDigital Humanities: Ferment in the Field, Research UncoveredDigital Wildfires: the challenge of provocative content on social media, Research UncoveredDigitization for Research at the Bodleian: Creating Tools for Active Scholarship, Research UncoveredFostering the gift of confidence for women in the electronic music scene, Research UncoveredJoanna Bullivant on the Delius Catalogue of Works, Research UncoveredJulia Craig-McFeely on Exultation and Despondency: the digital reconstruction of Tudor Partbooks, Research UncoveredMartin Maiden on digitizing meningitis: thirty years of sequencing the meningococcus, Research UncoveredNeil Jefferies on Framing Digital Objects within Context and Provenance, Research UncoveredWilliam Allen on visualizing UK immigration for and with non-academics, Research data management planning: An introduction for researchers, SEAHA Special Seminar in Multispectral and Hyperspectral Imaging, Sharing the Wealth: Numismatics in a World of Linked Open Data, Social Media: The risks, the opportunities and what it means for you and me, Software Carpentry workshop: Unix shell, git for version control, and programming in R, Speaking in Absence: Letters in the Digital Age. [24] Men, according to Faraone, were the primary users of the passion-inducing spells, while women were the main users of the affection spells. In any case, the Greeks and then the Romans widely adopted these practices. This incident could explain the sudden increase of curse tablets in the Kerameikos during the 5th century B.C.E. It was dedicated to the wells water nymph. And on the topic of this metal, and unexpectedly, I learned that the collection of defixiones at Bath is actually one of the largest yet found, and definitely one of the largest and most important in the archaeology of Roman Britain. Artificial Intelligence in the World of Languages, BNCWeb exploring a corpus of late twentieth century English, Big Data and History of Knowledge: Virtual Reconstructions and Enhanced Publications as interfaces to research, education, Blogging and digital scholarship - a forum, Bodleian Libraries Research Skills Toolkit - Humanities. During a famous speech by Thucydides, son Melesias, against Pericles construction program at the Pnyx, the meeting place of the Athenian assembly, Thucydides managed to incite passions of the assembly against his political opponent but in the middle of his speech his jaw suddenly dropped and he had to leave the platform. Winding the clock back still further, there is a clear mutual influence between Egyptian and Greek magic rituals.

They examine the languages and scripts in which they were written, the cursers, the scribes and those who were cursed. had been found mainly in tombs of dead people who had died in an untimely manner and were therefore thought suitable to carry the spell to the underworld. Model sarcophagus and figurine made of lead, found at the bottom of the Keremeikos well, 5th century B.C.E. The most common place to find them in this state is buried in graves or tombs, which is one of the reasons I would not have expected to see them in the thermae and associated temple at Aquae Sulis (the name for the Roman walled town where modern Bath now stands), which did not contain a necropolis or any other such structure.

The late Egyptian magical papyri show also [sic] signs of contact with Greek magic, which in turn was influenced by Egyptian magic. But there was good reason for the transition of ill-will from graves to wells in ancient Athens. [17] 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. Telling ancient tales to modern machines: representing Sumerian literary narratives as RDF, Text Analysis Masterclass: "How do we control what we measure using quantitative text analysis methods? King Tut And Other Parts Of Egyptian History We Got Wrong. So much so that papyri, written as the name implies, on the expensive material imported from Egypt, became all but synonymous with magic spells in the Greek culture. [18] All members of society, regardless of economic or class status, used such magic. Doing (very) contemporary history with the archived Web: Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, Don't Waste Space: how GIS can aid Digital Humanities research, Exploring modern European languages with CLARIN, Exploring spoken word data in oral history archives, From card to computer: a Bodleian catalogue and Early Modern Letters Online, Fundraising through Digital: how clicktivists, slacktivists and hacktivists are helping us beat cancer sooner, Historiography at Scale: People, Places, and Professions in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Immersive Technologies Summer School 2019, Immersive Technologies, Destination Oxford: a taste of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality for newbies, veterans and futurists, Impact through Online Presence: Tools and Strategies for the Humanities, Introducing the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), Introduction to Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities. They outline the preparation of curses, from making the tablet through writing the text to dispatching the curse to the gods. And then there were the curses that werent done in secret. Thwarted by a new law from placing their hexes in tombs of the untimely dead, Athenians sought a new avenue to the underworld gods. The first set of curse tablets to be discovered came from the city of Selinus in Sicily.

Waters in rivers and wells, both protected by nymphs, was believed to provide direct access to the underworld, as Dr. Stroszeck says.

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The element of mystique was given through many ways along with voces mysticae. There is also debate over the type of women that men were trying to attract with these spells. As to this last point in particular, there was a lead ingot which had all the characteristics we associate with such an object; a trapezoidal bricklike shape, a standard weight, a raised edge at the top of the casting to show it was whole (similar to what is done for coins if material was scraped off this raised area is quite visibly uneven allowing such thefts to be detected), and an inscription telling us under whose authority it was cast. [5] Curse tablets also included hair or pieces of clothing. "[7] The cursing rituals may also have incorporated physical binding gestures and spoken elements.[8]. [23] Christopher A. Faraone considered the spells to fall into two distinct categories; spells used for inducing passion and spells used for encouraging affection. Despite more than a century of excavations in Kerameikos, the well had not been excavated before. 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. Then, as I described of another in situ archaeological museum, you proceed downward through the strata of history, viewing the excavations of the site, together with displays of the artifacts found there. In any case, this area was characterized by transition: from urban to rural land, and from the city of the living to the realm of the dead. The answer may be very concrete, and may date back to the mid fifth century B.C.E. When the news reached Alcibiades, he became so afraid that he fled to Sparta and turned traitor. Pictures and charakteres gave further allure to the tablets, and occasionally specific formulae would be used and reused to relay a specifically intended tone. [21] 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,[21] and others such as Peter Green have also studied this aspect of ancient Greek society. There seemed to have been four main types of reasons to curse someone: to win a lawsuit (by cursing the opponents tongue and hands, for example); for business purposes, for instance cursing metalsmiths, bankers, prostitutes and pimps; to win athletic contests; and of course because of love and hate. That it first originated in medicine, no one entertains a doubt; or that, under the plausible guise of promoting health, it insinuated itself among mankind, as a higher and more holy branch of the medical art. And the curses. Where known the context of the curse tablets is presented. Letters and lines written back to front, magical gibberish and arcane words and symbols often lend the texts additional power to persuade. Defixiones, sometimes called curse tablets, are sheets of lead varying greatly in size, with the smallest around 1 x 1 inches and the largest 4 x 10 inches (Roughly 2.5 x 4.4/ 12.1 x 26.1 cm). TORCH - What Does it Mean to be Human in the Digital Age? [17] 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.[17]. The construction of the Parthenon met with a fair amount of opposition.

The well where the curses were found was excavated in 2016 by a team under Stroszecks direction while investigating the water supply to a bathhouse about 60 meters beyond the Dipylon - the city-gate on the road to the Academy. The love spells used were similar in design around the Mediterranean world,[22] and could be adjusted to different situations, users and intended victims. The belief was that throwing the curse into a well would activate it.

Probably he had been struck by stroke, but to the people it looked like Thucydides had been effectively cursed. Get email notification for articles from Philippe Bohstrom, Oval lead "coffin" with a spell against Pytheas et al., ordered by an Pytheas' opponent in an Athenian law court (reading: W. Peek), Credit: Dr. Jutta Stroszeck / German Archaeological Institute. Because of the superstition that the souls of certain types of dead remained active around the tombs for a while after death, making them suitable bearers of the curses to the netherworld, where hopefully the chthonic gods would do the cursers bidding. have compared the tablets to modern swearing, 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. Generally, the largest pool in a Roman bath is the natatio (swimming pool), which is typically neither as large as that at Bath nor heated, where this one is fed with water from the hotspring, so it is simply designated the Great Bath. One notable type of curse was a "Diakopai", a separation spell intended to drive away rivals by making them repulsive. ", The Music of Sound: a sonification symposium, The Oxford English Corpus lexicography and beyond, Training WorkshopLinked Data for Digital Scholarship: introducing the Semantic Web, Trunk to tail: linking ElEPHTs through the Semantic Web, Unlocking Musicology: Narratives through Data, Visualize Your Data for the Web using D3.js, Wellcome Trust Funding Event - Humanities & Social Sciences, Wikipedia: Women in Science improve-a-thon, Wikipedia: Women in Science transcribe-a-thon, Working with digital text: a hands-on introduction to basic computational techniques (Oxford-only), XML Editing: Basic XML editing with the oXygen XML Editor, XPath: Using XPath to search in the oXygen XML Editor, Zegami: Bringing your image collections to life, iSkills: Newspapers and other online news sources from the 17th to 21st century, The undiscoverd country: digital special collections, scholarship, scale, and society, An Introduction to Digital Humanities 2016, Humanities Data: a Hands-on Approach 2016. ", This page was last edited on 16 June 2022, at 09:05. ", Graf, Fritz. Music encoding as an interpretation process: Are there any traditions? Another type of curse was an "Agogai", a spell that was intended to bind its target to oneself. The person that ordered a curse is never mentioned by name, only the recipient, observes Dr. Jutta Stroszeck, director of the Kerameikos excavation on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens. A total of twenty-two tablets were found, mostly coming from the early fifth century, and directed toward someone that the user was suing. Is Digital Cultural Heritage more elitist than democratic? As well as Uley, the archaeological sites presented here include the temples at Lydney (Gloucestershire), Brean Down (Somerset), Pagans Hill (Somerset), the amphitheatre of the legionary fortress at Caerleon (Gwent), and the small towns at Chesterton-on-Fosse (Warwickshire) and Leintwardine (Herefordshire). Curse tablets are typically very thin sheets of lead with the text scratched on in tiny letters. Moreover, we find that as soon as there is a written language, it is used for magical formulae, some apotropaic, but just as often meant to harm others. The tablet cursing him was found inside a well near the Dipylon, the main gate of Athens and the principal point of entry of everyone in the city. That that I was familiar with some of the other materials in no way dimmed my enthusiasm, in fact they told the story of just how much of their way of life the Romans brought with them even to this distant outpost of their empire, as well as how modern in many ways these people were. These sheets were typically inscribed and sometimes drawn on, then folded or crumpled, sometimes with a lock of hair or other component enclosed within, and sometimes pierced with nails. [6] Not all tablets included a personal name, but it is clear especially in the Roman period, that tablets were sometimes prepared in advance, with space left for inserting the names provided by paying customers. 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. [16], Scholars from antiquity, like Christian philosopher Clement of Alexandria (ca. Professionals and laypeople alike would utilize palindromes as well as boustrophedon. Previous work in the area had been done by the architect Heinz Johannes and the archaeologist Kurt Gebauer, but was interrupted by World War II. The archaeologists hope to ultimately learn the name of the nymph, the nature of the curses and whether the targets of the hexes were any of the famous Athenians living in the city during the late fourth century B.C.E. One has to wonder why a civilization that developed philosophy, science and logic would stoop to black magic.

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[13] Over 80 similar tablets have been discovered in and about the remains of a temple to Mercury nearby, at West Hill, Uley,[14] making south-western Britain one of the major centres for finds of Latin defixiones. You arrive rather abruptly on an open-air balcony overlooking the Great Bath. Black arts were frowned on in Athens to begin with, and with the new law governing the cemetery, hexes couldnt just be placed in tombs any more, as had been the habit (35 had been found in the graves of Kerameikos, in previous excavations). had to find other points of contact with the underworld gods, Stroszeck explains. It was a public bathhouse, not a private one, that operated from Classical to Hellenistic times, the fifth to the first centuries B.C.E., and is thought to be the spa referred to by the comic playwright Aristophanes (Knights, 1307-1401). According to Cicero (De Legibus II 66), Demetrios of Phaleron, who ruled Athens in 317-307 B.C.E. Haaretz.com, the online English edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, gives you breaking news, analyses and opinions about Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World. READ/DOWNLOAD*( Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaiss, A gamemaker with interests including myth, language, history, and culture, READ/DOWNLOAD*( Brunelleschis Dome: How a Renaiss, Uncovering Childhood in the Early Modern World, Fighting to Be British: The Windrush Generation, You Need be Under No Concern About My Treatment Here Massachusetts Loyalists Return Home, Marilyn Monroe: A Short Biography of an Eternal Legacy. Baker, K. (2003), 'Greco-Roman Curses: Curse Tablets', Classical mythology in western art and literature, Faceted Application of Subject Terminology, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Curse_tablet&oldid=1093391500, Short description is different from Wikidata, Instances of Lang-el using second unnamed parameter, All articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases, Articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases from March 2011, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2011, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Dickie, Matthew W. "Who Practiced Love-Magic in Antiquity and in the Late Roman World? Tablets were also used for love spells and when used in this manner they were placed inside the home of the desired target. This was seen as a way to give them strength through inclusion of the central essence (Greek: Ousia) of the person. We explore too where tablets are found and how they are preserved and interpreted by archaeologists and historians. In fact, many of the earliest Roman defixiones continued to be written in Greek, seemingly as part of the ritual until eventually Latin came to dominate. I finally found one in Gordon and Simns Introduction to Magical Practice in the Latin West: In the late Republic, individuals such as the Pythagorean Nigidius Figulus (pr. The context of the other tablets found by metal detectorists is also briefly described (Hamble (Hampshire), Marlborough and Wanborough (Wiltshire)). None of the excavators survived the war: Johannes was sent to the Russian front and died there in 1945, and Gebauer died in an airplane crash over Vienna in 1942.

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