Viminacium's Gold Curse Tablets: Roman Spells Found in Serbia

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Viminacium's Inscribed Amulets and Ancient Beliefs
Archaeological Institute in Belgrade

In 2016 archaeologists working at Viminacium, a Roman city in eastern Serbia, announced an unusual find: tiny sheets of gold and silver, rolled up and placed inside small lead cases, buried with people in graves from around the 4th century AD. The sheets were inscribed with what the team described as spells or curses, written mostly in Greek letters, some naming spirits and demons. The excavators said that precious-metal tablets of this kind were extremely rare, and that the texts offered a glimpse of how ordinary Romans on the Danube frontier tried to influence luck, love and enemies through ritual.

Here is what was found, what the researchers could and could not read, and how these amulets fit into a much older tradition of written magic across the Roman world.

What the excavators found

The finds came from Roman burials at Viminacium, near the modern town of Kostolac on the Danube, roughly 90 km east of Belgrade. Each inscribed sheet was very small, roughly the size of a sweet wrapper, and had been rolled tightly and sealed in a little lead capsule before being laid in the grave. Alongside the writing were magical signs and symbols.

Miomir Korać, who led the excavations for the Archaeological Institute in Belgrade, told NBC News that he knew of no other such tablets inscribed in gold anywhere. He also pointed out that Roman custom normally kept gold out of graves, which made the choice of metal all the more striking.

According to Reuters, the team said the letters were Greek but the language seemed to be Aramaic or something they could not yet identify, and a member of the team, Ilija Danković, said they could make out the names of several demons associated with what is now Syria. Other reports noted that parts of the text appeared to be invented words and symbols, possibly written so that only gods and spirits could read them. Full translation and dating were still under way when the find was announced.

Viminacium: a frontier capital

Viminacium's Inscribed Amulets and Ancient Beliefs
Djordje Kojadinovic/Reuters

Viminacium began in the 1st century AD as a legionary fortress guarding the Danube frontier. The legion VII Claudia was based there, and a civilian city grew up beside the camp. It became the capital of the province of Moesia Superior and at its height may have had around 40,000 inhabitants, with an amphitheatre, baths, workshops and large cemeteries.

Attila's Huns sacked the city in 441, and although the emperor Justinian later rebuilt part of it, it never regained its importance. Today it is an archaeological park covering some 450 hectares, only a small fraction of which has been excavated. The area has produced thousands of graves, as well as a nearly complete mammoth skeleton found in a nearby lignite mine in 2009.

Curse tablets and binding spells in the Roman world

The Viminacium amulets belong to a broad family of ancient written magic. The best-known type is the curse tablet, or defixio, from a Latin word meaning to fix or bind. Around 1,600 have been found across the Greek and Roman world, most of them in Greek, usually scratched in small letters onto thin sheets of lead and then rolled, folded or pierced with a nail.

People wrote them for many reasons: to win a lawsuit, to beat a business or sporting rival, to make someone fall in love, or to punish a thief. They placed them where they believed the message would reach the underworld or the gods, such as graves, wells, springs and sacred pools. At the Roman baths in Bath, England, about 130 tablets were recovered, nearly all asking the goddess Sulis Minerva to punish people who had stolen clothing, money or other goods.

A tablet found in Leicester and announced in 2006 is a vivid example: it asks a god named Maglus to deal with whoever stole a cloak belonging to a man called Servandus, and it lists the suspects by name. Danković described the darker side of the genre to Reuters, quoting a curse that wished its target's body to become dead, cold and heavy like lead.

Why bury spells with the dead?

Ancient people often treated the dead as messengers. A tablet placed in a grave could be carried by the deceased's spirit to the powers below, who would then act on its request. The Viminacium team suggested, according to Reuters, that such texts were especially associated with people who had died violently or too young, because their restless souls were thought to linger and to find demons and deities more easily.

The archaeologists were careful to say they did not yet know how the people buried with these amulets had died, so that explanation remained a possibility rather than a conclusion. It is also possible that some sheets were protective charms worn in life and buried with their owners, rather than curses aimed at others. Small inscribed metal scrolls carried for protection, sometimes called phylacteries, are well known from the late Roman period.

Gold, gods and a slow change of faith

Two features made the find especially interesting to historians. The first is the material. Lead was cheap, so using gold and silver suggests either real wealth or a desperate level of hope in the ritual. Korać said the find showed how prosperous life in Viminacium could be.

The second is the mix of powers invoked. According to the excavators, some texts call on both Christian and pagan figures, which Korać read as evidence that conversion to Christianity in the region was gradual. That fits what historians know of the 4th century: Christianity gained imperial favour under Constantine and became dominant by the century's end, yet older practices such as amulets, charms and appeals to spirits survived alongside the new faith for generations. Korać also noted that Christians and pagans were buried side by side at the site.

How to read a find like this

Discoveries of "magic spells" attract dramatic headlines, so it helps to separate what is known from what is interpretation. Archaeologists can say with confidence where the objects were found, what they are made of and roughly when they were buried. Reading damaged, tiny inscriptions in an unfamiliar mix of scripts and languages is much harder, and early translations are often revised once specialists publish the full texts.

Calling these objects spells describes what the people who made them believed they could do. It is a record of hopes, fears and religious practice, not evidence that the requested effects ever happened. Their real value is human: they let us hear, in fragments, the private wishes of people who lived on the edge of the Roman Empire some 1,600 years ago. Researchers at the Archaeological Institute in Belgrade have since published studies of gold and silver amulets from Moesia Superior, and the Viminacium site continues to yield new finds.

Sources: Original report by ScienceAlert; NBC News, "Roman curse tablets made of gold discovered in Serbia"; reporting by Reuters (2016); Wikipedia, Viminacium; Wikipedia, Curse tablet. Photos: Archaeological Institute in Belgrade; Djordje Kojadinovic/Reuters.

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