The Aquincum tablet reveals its secret – Curses on a sheet of lead from Antiquity
MúzeumCafé 13.
It is not easy to understand an ancient curse tablet. Those who commissioned it and those who it was directed against died many centuries ago. Some text still has to be deciphered, though full understanding is almost complete. By the end of the year Andrea Barta, a noted expert of dead languages who has been studying the Latin words on the lead sheet, and archaeologist Gábor Lassányi, who found the tablet in the former Aquincum cemetery in 2007 will be ready. The curse tablet, which to the uninitiated looks simply like an old piece of metal, dates from the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. and is an especially rare find. Unlike other ancient curse tablets, it was not written in Greek but in Latin, and it is rare also because its text can be almost fully understood. To date only four curse tablets written in Latin have been found in the region of ancient Pannonia. The Ptuj tablet inscribes a love curse by a rejected man – the woman in question should never become somebody else’s; a tablet discovered in the River Kulpa preserves the spells a group of servants put on one another; another found in Ljubjana lists cursed names; while the Petronelli tablet has spells to revenge a person who stole dishes, asking the gods of the afterworld to have the stolen objects returned to their owner in nine days and should that not happen then “you should be as angry as this lead is heavy”. Barta and Lassányi think that the tablet inscribes a trial procedure. The point in dispute is unknown for the time being, but according to Barta following the deciphering of the missing half lines this secret can also be revealed. The tablet was made so that the specified persons could not act and confess against one another – they should not be able to reveal the truth or any secret should they be subject to questioning.