materialsLeadtabella defixionis

Curse tablets are typically very thin sheets of lead with the text scratched on in tiny letters. They were rolled, folded, or pierced with nails, and then put out of reach: buried in graves or tombs, thrown into wells or pools, sequestered in underground sanctuaries, or nailed to the walls of temples. Around 1,600 have been found, most of them inscribed in Greek, with 220 from Attica. The first group discovered came from Selinus in Sicily — twenty-two tablets, mostly from the early fifth century BCE, directed at someone the writer was suing.

Britain holds the largest single deposit. In 1979 and 1980 the Bath curse tablets were found at Aquae Sulis, and all but one of the 130 concern the restitution of stolen goods; over eighty more came from the temple to Mercury at West Hill, Uley nearby, which makes south-western Britain one of the major centres for finds of Latin defixiones. Roger Tomlin published the Bath group in 1988 under a title that names the metal twice over: Tabellae Sulis: Roman inscribed tablets of tin and lead from the sacred spring at Bath.

What is written on them is not always a curse. Texts are addressed to infernal or liminal gods — Pluto, Charon, Hecate, Persephone — sometimes through a dead person, usually the corpse in whose grave the tablet lay. Many list the target's crimes in detail and hand the punishment to the gods, and some scholars refuse the word curse for those, preferring judicial prayers. Tablets were also used to help the dead: those laid at the graves of people who had died young or violently were meant to settle their souls.

Inference — the tablet and the amulet are one technology used in two directions. Both name a person. Both write a formula on metal. Both are folded, pierced or rolled, and both are put where nobody will read them — sewn in, buried, nailed up. Kotansky's corpus of protective amulets is titled Greek Magical Amulets: the inscribed gold, silver, copper and bronze lamellae; the tablets are the same lamellae in a base metal, aimed the other way. Filing them apart would hide the fact that the same hands made both.

Lead also moved as a raw material rather than an object: Egyptian faience workshops imported lead and copper during periods of prosperity, when the ores were not available locally.

Hammered into a sheet, scratched with a stylus, then rolled, folded or nailed. Sometimes the tablet was made in advance with a blank left for a name: "Not all tablets included a personal name, but it is clear especially in the Roman period, that tablets were sometimes prepared in advance, with space left for inserting the names provided by paying customers." Hair or a piece of the target's clothing could be folded in with the sheet.

Lead is still worn and it still poisons children. In March 2009 a one-year-old boy in New York City had a blood lead level of 10 µg/dL, which reached 20 µg/dL three months later. The source was an amulet: a knotted string onto which grey metallic beads had been moulded, bought by the boy's mother in a rural Cambodian market, worn since he was three months old and observed being mouthed. The beads' total lead content was 450,000 mg/kg, or 45 per cent. Eight days after the amulet was removed his level was 14 µg/dL; at six weeks 10, and at five months 5. The report's recommendation is that health-care providers ask parents about their use of amulets, particularly in Southeast Asian families and where a child has an elevated blood lead level. New York City's health department names the class of object plainly — amulets, sheesha, tabiz, metal charms, necklaces and bracelets given to children can contain high levels of lead — and asks that they be kept out of a child's mouth, naming no country of origin.