Nearly 2,000-Year-Old Roman Curse Tablet Found Beneath Dutch Town May Carry Egyptian Magic

A small sheet of lead has magic symbols and four names.

The dead were never entirely silent in the Roman world. Beneath roads, temples, bathhouses and graves, people sometimes hid messages meant not for the living, but for powers imagined to dwell below the earth. In Heerlen, in the southern Netherlands, archaeologists have now recovered one of those messages: a small sheet of lead, scratched with Greek letters, magical signs and the names of four enslaved people.

The tablet, found in a pit beneath Heerlen’s town hall square, dates to the second century C.E. At that time, this corner of Europe belonged to the Roman province of Lower Germania. The sheet is tiny, roughly the size of a credit card. Yet it carries a drama much larger than itself.

The inscription may have asked supernatural forces to harm four enslaved men and women. Or it may have been written on their behalf, calling on gods and demons to strike someone else.

A Roman Town Beneath a Dutch City

Modern Heerlen stands atop Coriovallum, a Roman military settlement along the Via Belgica, the road that linked the region around Tongeren with Cologne.

Coriovallum was no backwater. Its Roman baths, excavated in the 1940s, remain the largest visible Roman ruins in the Netherlands. Now, the curse tablet adds a more intimate relic to that monumental landscape.

The artifact eventually went to Heidelberg University’s Institute for Papyrology, where researchers used reflectance transformation imaging. The method works by photographing the same surface under many different lights, then combining the images so faint scratches become legible.

The inscription was unusual for a Roman frontier town in the Netherlands. Most curse tablets found in northern Europe were written in Latin, but this one was written in Greek. Its wording and symbols also point to Egyptian-style magic, a tradition that had spread widely through the Roman Empire by the second century.

At the top of the tablet are three magical signs, known as characteres. Ancient spell-writers used these symbols as a kind of secret script for addressing gods, demons or other supernatural forces. Beneath them are four names: two men with Latin names and two women with Greek names. The inscription identifies all four as enslaved people.

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What researchers still cannot say is whether those four people were the targets of the spell, or whether the spell was written on their behalf against someone else.

“The tablet served either as a curse against these four slaves or as a curse in their name against an unnamed person,” Rodney Ast, academic director at Heidelberg University’s Institute for Papyrology.

Lead, Magic and the Business of Revenge

Curse tablets were quite common during these ancient times. Greeks called them katadesmoi; Romans called them defixiones. Across the empire, from Syria to Britain, archaeologists have found them in graves, wells, sanctuaries and pits.

Most were made of lead, which was cheap and abundant in the empire, as well as soft and easy to inscribe. It was also heavy and cold. Ancient practitioners believed those qualities gave it binding power. A name written on lead and buried in the earth could symbolically bind a rival, silence an opponent, ruin a betraying lover, weaken an unliked athlete or influence a legal dispute.

More than 1,500 such tablets have been found, and some scholars put the number above 2,000.

“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 classicist at Yale University. “It was a way of gaining an edge over an opponent, of using ritual and the divine to improve one’s circumstances.”

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Egypt on the Northern Frontier

Egypt had become a Roman province after the defeat of Cleopatra and Mark Antony in 30 B.C.E. Yet Egypt’s religious prestige did not disappear. If anything, it grew. Romans admired, feared and consumed Egyptian antiquity, magic rituals and divine imagery.

In the first centuries C.E., cults, goods and ideas from Egypt and the Near East moved along the same routes as grain, soldiers and merchants.

“In the early centuries C.E., Near Eastern, Egyptian, Jewish, and sometimes even Christian traditions increasingly merged and spread throughout the entire Roman Empire of that time — a development that the discovery from Heerlen impressively underscores,” Joachim Quack, director of Heidelberg University’s Institute of Egyptology, stated.

One of the two women named in Greek may have known Egyptian-style ritual traditions firsthand.

“It cannot be ruled out that one of the two women was the author of the inscription and had brought the supposed ability to communicate with divine powers through such curses with her from Roman Egypt,” Julia Lougovaya, a research associate at Heidelberg University’s Institute for Papyrology, said.

Soon, the tablet will go on public display in Heerlen Museum.