Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 0%
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 0%
• Representativeness Heuristic - 0%
• Hindsight Bias - 0%
• Overconfidence Bias - 2.7% (23 hits)
• Framing Effect - 0%
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 0%

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A Lead Tablet Buried Beneath a Dutch Town Square Held a 2,000-Year-Old Curse

It might have been easy to overlook.

Curled and browned with age, the ancient lead tablet unearthed in Heerlen, the Netherlands, was small enough to fit in the palm of archaeologist Hilde Vanneste’s hand.

But this was a highly unusual find for the region—evidently a remnant of the Roman Empire.

Even more intriguing was the barely legible ancient Greek inscription, caked in nearly 2,000 years of earth, that held potent magic.

Vanneste and her research team sent the tablet to papyrologists at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

It turned out to be one of the curse tablets known as katadesmoi in Greek or defixiones in Latin.

Lead was the medium of choice because it was cheap and easy to inscribe, but also because people believed it possessed a symbolic “binding” power that reinforced the curse’s hold over its victim.

Lead’s supernatural powers were thought to make the spell inescapable.

These binding charms were inscribed on the tablets, then conveniently folded and buried in places thought to be gateways to the underworld: graves, sanctuaries, cisterns, wells, and bath houses.

From there, the vengeful message was believed to reach the gods on the other side.

Each tablet was essentially a portable hex.

“It’s truly remarkable,” Vanneste told L1 News in an interview.

“The first time I held it, I was like, what is this?

But if you really look at it closely, you’ll see that it has inscriptions in Greek.

The first two lines contain several magical formulas, a kind of ‘abracadabra,’ but in Greek, and then, in between, there are a number of signs, symbols, sort of stick figures, and two figures that appear to be lying on top of each other.”

Two millennia ago, what’s now Heerlen was Coriovallum, a prosperous Roman military settlement in the province of Lower Germania.

Previous excavations there have uncovered the ruins of public buildings, houses, a bathhouse, a cemetery, and artifacts such as pottery and a metal ear-cleaning spoon.

The lead tablet was recovered from a pit beneath Heerlen’s town hall square.

When it reached papyrologist Rodney Ast at Heidelberg University’s Institute for Papyrology, he and his team used reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) to make out the inscription.

RTI captures multiple images of a stationary object using a fixed camera and a varying light source.

The resulting image composites every possible lighting angle, revealing how the surface interacts with each one, and its properties can be adjusted to further enhance visibility.

After imaging the tablet, Ast found that it represented several cultures.

It was written in ancient Greek, which is unusual because most hexes found in the northern parts of the Roman Empire, such as Heerlen, were in Latin.

But the tablet’s manner of invoking deities and demons was distinctly Egyptian.

Magical glyphs known as charaktêres communicated with the powers called upon, so that some form of divine intervention would strike down an adversary.

At the bottom, the inscriber had etched the names of two men with Latin names and two women with Greek names, identified as “fellow slaves.”

Whether someone else cursed these four or they cast the spell with their own hands against a nameless enemy remains unclear.

It’s possible that at least one of these individuals carried curses with them all the way from Roman Egypt.

The tablet dates from around 200 C.E., when Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Levantine customs merged within the Roman Empire, which is evident in its inscription.

Ancient Egyptian culture was steeped in magic.

Protective amulets in the images of gods hung from necklaces, and practitioners whispered charms alongside medical remedies.

Embalmers wrapped mummies in linen strips inked with spells and layered with concealed amulets.

Curses carved into the rock of a tomb were supposed to deter grave robbers.

Spells on papyri guarded the living and guided the dead—most famously in surviving copies of the Book of the Dead, which accompanied the deceased to their tombs as a guide to reaching the underworld.

At least 2,000 curse tablets have surfaced throughout the territory that once belonged to the Roman Empire, and they meant what they said.

Another tablet in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University condemns a group of men involved in a lawsuit that raged in a Doric Greek town in Sicily around 450 B.C.E.

Who won the suit remains unknown, but the belief that otherworldly forces could involve themselves in the human world ran strong when it came to vengeance.

It’s thought that the curse was recited after being etched into lead with a stylus.

If it was spoken before being deposited in a grave or another entrance to the realm of the gods, there was possibly a greater chance of those words reaching a deity’s ears.

“We don’t have many written remains from the Roman period [in the Netherlands],” Vanneste said.

“We do have inscriptions on gravestones, but these [tablets] are really very personal curses or incantations.

Well, that can also be white magic, of course.

That gives you a good idea of the people who lived here 2,000 years ago.”