Greek curse tablets show what Ancient Athenians thought of the underworld

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A bumper crop of curse tablets was retrieved from a bathhouse well in the Athenian Kerameikos, where they had sat undiscovered since the late-4th to early-3rd-century BCE. Curse tablets discovered in the region have typically been from the 5th and 4th century BCE and were mostly found in tombs – so why were these items found in a well?

Researchers involved in the discovery believe that a change in law may be to blame, as guards blocked people’s access to tombs in Athens where they probably would have preferred to commit their curses.

People seeking vengeance, therefore, had to get creative as to where they could dispel their curse tablets, and a public well may have presented the perfect opportunity.

Furthermore, the fact that wells plunge into the ground may have led those in need of a good curse to think that this was an alternative route to the underworld while the tombs were out of action.

“The findspot in a bathhouse well can be related to the fact that curse tablets, which were in earlier times preferably deposited in certain kinds of tombs, were now dropped into wells that were seen as another possibility of access to the underworld,” said Dr Jutta Stroszeck from the German Archaeological Institute, Athens (DAI), to IFLScience.

Source: https://www.iflscience.com/discovery-of-30-curse-tablets-shows-how-athenian-bathhouse-well-became-a-chute-to-the-underworld-63949