Roman-Era Curse Tablet Discovered Beneath a Dutch Town Square

Dutch archaeologists discovered a second-century lead curse tablet, or defixio, in a pit or well beneath the Town Hall square in Heerlen, Netherlands. This site was once the Roman military settlement of Coriovallum. The artifact measures roughly 9.3 by 4.8 centimeters. Dr. Rodney Ast and his colleagues at the Institute for Papyrology at the University of Heidelberg used reflectance transformation imaging to decipher the text. Researchers report that the inscription is written in ancient Greek, which is unusual since northern European curse tablets typically feature Latin.

The text contains invocations of deities and demons rooted in an Egyptian-style magical tradition, alongside three magical symbols known as characteres. The inscription also lists the names of four enslaved people. Two are men with Latin names, and two are women with Greek names. Researchers suggest these individuals may have been the targets of the curse or used as intermediaries to pronounce it. For those studying the archaeology of religion and the occult, this artifact provides a rare northern European example of an Egyptian-style magical tradition written in ancient Greek.