Competition between modern business owners may seem cutthroat at times, but the discovery of five 2,400 year old lead tablets from Greece, shows these tendencies are hardly anything new.
According to Live Science and the Daily Mail, a team of researchers led by Jessica Lamont of Johns Hopkins University recovered the tablets from the final resting place of a possible tavern owner and found that they contained curses against the owners of four rival establishments.
Four out of the five tablets contained curses that involved the name of “chthonic” (underworld) deities like Hekate Chthonia, Artemis Chthonia, and Hermes Chthonios. The curses called upon the deities to “cast hate” upon their rivals, Lamont’s team explained in a paper published earlier this week in the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik (ZPE).
They were discovered, folded, and pierced with an iron nail, along with the cremated remains of the woman, as well as libations and other religious offerings, and date back to the fourth century BCE, according to reports. The researchers said that their content reveals much about the rituals and social practices prevalent during the era.
Curses meant to target victims’ businesses and property
As LiveScience explains, ancient cultures believed that placing the tablets in the grave would have enabled the curses to reach the underworld gods, who would then act upon the requests. Each of the curses on the four tablets was intended for a different pair of married tavern owners, while the fifth was blank and likely had an incantation recited orally over it.
In the study, Lamont and her colleagues said that one of the tablets, when translated from Greek, asked the aforementioned chthonic gods to “cast your hate upon Phanagora and Demetrios, and their tavern and their property and their possessions” and to “smite down a kynotos,” a term that translates to “dog’s ear” and was an ancient gambling term for the lowest possible outcome on a pair of dice), “on [your] tongue.” The other three curses were similar in nature.
According to the study’s authors, Hermes is commonly called upon in such curses, and the Daily Mail noted that the goddess Hekate was “dangerous and liminal.” Artemis, on the other hand, is typically linked to the protection of women, but the curses were meant to appear to the goddess’s “destructive side,” which was associated with “the realm of the sinister and the threatening.”
The curses were designed to target the victim’s businesses and property, and by all accounts, completing such rituals would have been a taxing process likely born from the desperation of the person or persons performing them, the researchers said. The text appears to indicate that each of the tablets were carved by an experienced scribe, and while it is not 100 percent certain that these curses were the result of a business rivalry, the authors call that the most likely scenario.
The tablets were found in a classical grave located beyond the Athenian Long Walls northeast of Piraeus, Greece – a site that was excavated by archaeologists in 2003. Once they were recovered, the tablets were moved to the Piraeus Museum, which is where Lamont began studying them. As for the woman in the grave, it is unclear if she was the one who wanted the curses to be cast or if she just happened to pass away at the same time that another member of the community wanted revenge on a business rival.
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