Incantations, Spells & Curses

The Attic Curse Tablets

Curse Tablet Deposit

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "The Attic Curse Tablets." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/incantations-spells-curses/the-attic-curse-tablets.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). The Attic Curse Tablets. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/incantations-spells-curses/the-attic-curse-tablets

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-the-attic-curse-tablets,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {The Attic Curse Tablets},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/incantations-spells-curses/the-attic-curse-tablets},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The Athenian curse tablets, recovered over more than a century from graves, wells and sanctuary deposits in and around the city, and the earliest large body of this material anywhere. They are where the practice can be watched taking shape. The characteristic verb is katadeo, to bind down, from which the modern term katadesmos comes, and the earliest examples do little more than list names, as though writing a rival's name on lead and putting it out of reach were the whole of the act.

Facts

The Witness

Surviving Witness

Several hundred inscribed lead tablets recovered over more than a century 1

Writing Medium

Lead sheets, inscribed, folded, sometimes pierced with a nail, and deposited out of reach 1

Findspot

Graves, wells and sanctuary deposits in and around Athens 1

Corpus Reference

DTA, from Wunsch's Defixionum Tabellae Atticae, 1897, published as a supplement to Inscriptiones Graecae III 1

Purpose and Target

Purpose Class

Binding an opponent in litigation, competition, trade or courtship 2

Faraone's four-part sorting in Magika Hiera, 1991. The categories are a scholarly analysis of the corpus rather than terms the writers used.

Power Invoked

Chthonic powers where any are named at all, among them Hermes and Persephone. A large number of the tablets invoke nobody and consist of the target's name alone 2

Origins

Language of Composition

Attic Greek, over a span of centuries, so the tablets also record how the dialect was written by ordinary hands 1

Scholarship

Critical Edition

Richard Wunsch, Defixionum Tabellae Atticae, 1897 (Inscriptiones Graecae III, Appendix), the foundational edition, since supplemented by Jordan's and Curbera's re-editions. 1

First Published

Richard Wunsch, 1897 1

Learn More

Where the Practice Can Be Watched Beginning

The Attic tablets are the earliest large body of curse texts anywhere, running from the fifth century BCE, and they are the closest thing the subject has to a starting point. They were recovered over more than a century from graves, wells and sanctuary deposits in and around Athens, and Richard Wunsch edited them in 1897 as a supplement to the third volume of Inscriptiones Graecae. The DTA numbers still used to cite them are his.

The earliest examples are startlingly bare. Many consist of names and nothing else, inscribed on a lead sheet which is then folded, sometimes pierced with a nail, and put where it cannot be retrieved. There is no address to a god, no reason given and no request. Writing the name and putting it out of circulation appears to have been the whole of the act.

Over the following centuries the texts grow. Deities are addressed, most often the powers of the underworld. Reasons appear. Formulae develop, and by the Roman period the same phrases can be found across the Mediterranean. Watching that sequence is the reason the Attic material is disproportionately important: it shows an elaborate late antique technology assembling itself out of something extremely simple, rather than arriving fully formed.

Four Situations, and What They Have in Common

Christopher Faraone's analysis in the 1991 volume Magika Hiera sorted the early Greek binding tablets by the situation that produced them, and found four: litigation, where the writer faces an opponent in court; competition, against athletes, actors and performers; trade, against a commercial rival; and courtship. The categories are not equally represented and the boundaries are not always clean, but the sorting produced an observation that reoriented the field.

In all four settings the writer is about to compete and expects to lose. The tablets are not the weapon of the powerful against the weak. They are what someone reaches for when facing a better speaker, a faster runner, a busier shop or a preferred suitor, and the recurring anxiety they express is of being outmatched in public. On that reading the practice is defensive in motivation even where it is aggressive in form, and it belongs with the ordinary competitive pressures of a small, intensely public city rather than with anything exotic.

The reading has been argued with. Not every tablet fits an agonistic setting, some writers are plainly not underdogs, and treating a genre as an expression of anxiety risks explaining away what the writers said they were doing. But it established the terms of the discussion, and the alternative it displaced, which treated the tablets as evidence of a superstitious underclass, was worse. It is also why the material is now read as social history rather than as a curiosity of religion.

Cross-Tradition Connections