Curse tablet find in Leicester

The 1,700-year-old tablet to the Roman god Maglus, discovered at a site on the city's Vine Street, features an ancient curse aimed at a thief.

Written on a sheet of lead in the second or third century AD, the curse reads: "To the god Maglus, I give the wrongdoer who stole the cloak of Servandus. Silvester, Riomandus (etc.) ... that he destroy him before the ninth day, the person who stole the cloak of Servandus?" The tablet also features a list of 18 or 19 suspects, all of them inhabitants of Roman Leicester.

Article here; note that the subtitle (which appears on several other writeups as well) claiming that the excavators are calling this "the oldest curse in the world" is surely mistaken: the antiquity of curse tablets is well known to archeologists, who would surely not have made such a claim for this relatively late example. More on British curse tablets here, and on Greek curse tablets here.

Posted by David on December 1, 2006 11:02 AM