The Pella Curse Tablet

The tablet was found in 1986 in a grave in the cemetery at Pella, the Macedonian capital, and dates to the fourth century BCE. Emmanuel Voutiras published the edition and study in 1998. It is a single lead sheet, and what makes it exceptional in a corpus of many hundreds is that it does not read like a formula.

The writer is a woman. She acts against the marriage of a man named Dionysophon to a woman named Thetima, and against any other marriage he might make, and asks that he take no wife but herself. She says she is alone. She asks to grow old beside him. Where the Attic tablets typically list names and bind them, this one gives a situation, a reason and a state of mind, and the person who wrote it is present in it in a way the corpus almost never allows.

That is the reason it is quoted so often outside the study of ancient magic, in work on women's lives, on marriage, and on the emotional range of documents that survive from the classical world. The genre is binding; the document is a person's account of her own position. Both are true at once, and the tablet is a useful corrective to any reading of curse tablets as a purely mechanical technology.

The find context is part of the document. The tablet was placed in a grave, which in this tradition is not concealment but delivery: the dead were held to be able to carry a message down to the powers below, and a burial was the route by which a written request reached them. Someone therefore had to get the tablet into a grave, which took either access or payment.

There is one further thing the tablet does not give, and its absence is conspicuous. The writer names Dionysophon and she names Thetima, and she does not name herself. The most personal document in a corpus of many hundreds was written by a woman whose name did not survive, and every discussion of her circumstances is a discussion of an anonymous person.

Whether ancient Macedonian was a dialect of Greek or a distinct language related to it has been argued for well over a century, and for most of that time the argument was conducted almost without evidence. The Macedonian court wrote in Attic Greek. Macedonian inscriptions are in Greek. What the population actually spoke survived mainly in a scatter of glosses recorded by later lexicographers and in personal names, neither of which is a satisfactory basis for classifying a language.

The Pella tablet changed the evidential position because it is a continuous text, of some length, written by an ordinary person rather than a chancery, in a Northwest Greek dialect carrying features that have been read as Macedonian. For one side of the argument that settles the matter: what the tablet shows is a speaker of a Greek dialect, and the writer was not a courtier performing Attic.

The atlas records the linguistic claim as debated rather than attested, for a reason that is methodological rather than nationalist. One document written by one person establishes what that person wrote. It does not by itself establish what the population around her spoke, and the possibility that a Greek dialect was in written use alongside a different spoken vernacular is not excluded by a written text. The tablet is the best evidence there is, it points in one direction, and it is still one tablet. The dispute is also entangled with modern political claims over the name Macedonia, and that entanglement is part of why the scholarship on it is worth reading carefully.