Ancient table found in UK contains bad curse

An ancient tablet unearthed in Kent has turned out to be inscribed with curses intended to bring bad luck to more than a dozen people, The Daily Mail reports.

The rolled up lead tablet found in East Farleigh, on the site of a Roman farmstead, was found in a 3rd to 4th Century building that may have been some kind of temple.

Inscribed on the lead in capital letters are the names of 14 people, which an Oxford University expert says were the intended victims of the curse.

Once inscribed, the tablets would be rolled up to conceal their inscriptions then either nailed to the wall of a temple or buried in places considered close to the underworld, such as graves, springs or wells.

The Kent scroll had likewise been carefully rolled up and buried. As it was unrolled, the inscribed letters became visible under a scanning election microscope.

Dr Roger Tomlin, lecturer in Late Roman History at Wolfson College, Oxford, who is an authority on Roman inscriptions, spent four days examining the scroll. He said he believes it was made in the 3rd Century AD.

“The tablet is not dated,” said Dr Tomlin, “and since it is written in capital letters it is not possible to date it by handwriting. It’s possible that it was made in the third century AD.

“Lists of names are quite often found on lead tablets. Sometimes they accompany a complaint of theft addressed to a god, and name persons suspected of the theft.”

Dr Tomlin told Discovery News he believed that the tablet consists of two columns of names, but that it is not necessarily complete.

But the motive behind the curse, and indeed the nature of the curse itself, both remain a mystery since experts have as yet been able to glean no clue from the text.

“No god is named. Indeed, we cannot be sure that we have the beginning of the text,' Dr Tomlin told Discovery.

Part of the tablet's significance also lies in the fact the Romans were the first literate inhabitants of Britain, making it and other similar items among the earliest written records of British life.

“If this is a curse tablet, which it seems to be, it is presumably a product of its local community - so it is a reasonable guess that the persons named on it lived there,” Dr Tomlin said.

Dr Tomlin explained the presence of Celtic names on the scroll. “They are Celtic in etymology (but) they have Latin case-endings,” he said.

“So far as we can judge there was a mix of Roman and Celtic names in the name-stock of Roman Britain. Just as in modern Britain, it would be risky to deduce national differences from names alone.”

The Kent Archaeological Society is paying the Sittingbourne-based Conservation Science Investigations (CSI) to conserve the tablet and continue research.

The group hopes the public will be able to visit CSI's offices to watch some of the work as it is underway. It may be possible to put the scroll on public display at the end of this year.

The East Farleigh site has been slowly excavated since 2005. Following a geophysical survey using a resistivity meter, the foundations of the walls of three rooms and a corridor were unearthed.

Pits below the rooms contained painted wall plaster and tiles from an underfloor heating system. with archaeologists discovering relics including painted wall plaster and an underfloor heating system.

The East Farleigh site: Pits below the rooms contained painted wall plaster and tiles from an underfloor heating system

Since 2007 several more buildings have been located, parts of which had been destroyed during the construction of a hop-garden for Courage Brewery in 1939.

Discoveries have included the remains of a store room, two bread ovens, a cooking fire, a quern stone for grinding corn and a wall rendered, painted and decorated to imitate marble cladding.

In what had been a kitchen there were pottery vessels with flint grits for grinding food and spices, many broken cooking pots manufactured locally, and better quality pots from Hampshire and Oxfordshire.

A piece of Whitby jet jewellery, part of a greenstone cosmetic mixing pallet, a bunch of keys, a bronze child’s bracelet, a gaming counter and bone pins have been also been excavated.


A hoard of 153 mid-fourth century copper coins, dumped on a floor, has been donated to Maidstone Museum.