‘Curse tablets’ addressed to Roman god found at ancient cemetery. What do they say?
While excavating a historic hospital in France, a team of archaeologists uncovered dozens of Roman-era graves, some with ancient “curse tablets,” in what appears to be an all-male cemetery, according to a news release.
Experts with the Orléans Archaeology Service began working at the site in Orléans — about a 75-mile drive southwest of Paris — in 2022 and have found more than 60 graves, the organization said in a release and LiveScience reported.
But some of the burials include small, rolled up lead plates — known as “curse tablets” — with inscriptions in Latin and Gaulish, an extinct Celtic language.
In one of the graves, which researchers are identifying as F2199, a “curse tablet” was found between the man’s legs alongside a vase and money, according to the release.
What are ‘curse tablets’?
“Curse tablets,” also known as “defixiones,” were used to get even with rivals in the afterlife, YaleNews reported.
“These were very charged, aggressive, powerful ritual objects that were meant to transform threatening situations, anxiety-filled circumstances, professional rivalries, and personal relationships that had soured or gone awry,” Jessica Lamont, a social and cultural historian at Yale, told the outlet.
While several have been found with inscriptions in Greek and Latin across the Mediterranean world, few have been recovered in Celtic languages, according to research published in Cambridge University Press.
What do these say?
Pierre-Yves Lambert, a French linguist and Celtic studies scholar at the National Centre for Scientific Research, suggested the tablet found in F2199 included Gaulish inscription, calling on the Roman god of war, Mars, to invoke a curse on a list of names for their injustice.
Researchers are still working to translate the other tablets, in some cases using an imaging technique called Reflectance Transformation Imaging, according to Live Science.
Google Translate was used to translate the Museum of the Orléans Archaeology Service news release.
This story was originally published January 17, 2025 at 6:14 PM with the headline "‘Curse tablets’ addressed to Roman god found at ancient cemetery. What do they say?."
