From Graves to Wells? New curse tablets from the Athenian Ceramicus and the Local Development of the Cursing Ritual

• Applicant: Dr. Sara Chiarini, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Ancient History ; Greek and Latin Philology ; Classical, Roman, Christian and Islamic Archaeology
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 438011339

The project aims first of all to decipher and publish a new cache of 29 ancient Greek curse tablets that were unearthed during the 2011-2016 excavation campaigns at well B 34 of the Ceramicus by the Athenian department of the German Archaeological Institute. From the decipherment of this new epigraphic material I expect to expand our knowledge of Athenian onomastics and prosopography, as well as of the repertoire of the ancient language of cursing, and to hopefully discover the name of the divinity venerated in the well.Moreover I will address the question of the impact of the new finds on our knowledge about cursing practices in the Ceramicus. Due to their finding context the new tablets change the way in which we have so far regarded the Ceramicus as a traditional space where to practice cursing rituals.Finally I will incorporate the results from the new finds into the overall Athenian tradition of cursing. This implies an epigraphic and textual comparison between the new tablets and those already published, both those whose archaeological context is documented and the many more whose dating was based only on palaeography, prosopography or employed formulae. Especially for the latter group the comparison could reveal useful, insofar as improvements in their dating can be expected.With the help of the new material I will also address a broader issue affecting the corpus of Athenian curse tablets: while a remarkable decrease in the evidence of inscribed curse tablets between the middle of the Hellenistic age and the early imperial period is common to the entire ancient world, the growth in the evidence from the 2nd century AD, as it can be noticed considering all curse tablets from antiquity, does not apply to Athens or, more broadly, to the region of Attica, despite the continuity of evidence for this ritual practice that has to be assumed for this area. The amount of curse tablets from the classical and early Hellenistic ages is remarkably higher than that of any later period. This situation might depend on several factors, which need to be examined individually. One of the aspects that seems to me most promising in offering some explanation about the rareness of late curse tablets in Athens concerns the type of finding spots. Athenian curses were found mainly in two types of settings: graves and wells. If one considers the chronology of the finds from graves and wells respectively, the concentration of most of the late pieces in wells emerges. From this observation one could derive the hypothesis that some sort of evolution in the cursing habits of the Athenians took place, so that from the late Hellenistic age wells and fountains became more popular than graves as places of deposition of curse tablets.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partner: Dr. Jutta Stroszeck