The Lead Tablet from Tongres: Curse or amulet?

Abstract

The editors of the lead tablet recently excavated in Tongres conclude that it was a curse tablet, primarily because of its lead medium and because all four of the later, but similarly designed tablets, are or seem to be curses. In this essay, however, I argue that the Tongres tablet was, in fact, an amulet for a house or a workshop. The archaeology provides three important bits of evidence, because the tablet was nailed up on a wall, exposed to the open air for a good deal of time and displayed in a commercial or domestic context possibly in the midst of wooden buildings. I further my argument by discussing three issues unaddressed by the editio princeps: (i) the shared syntax of three of the five tablets, which ask a deity to “give” or “grant” some abstract quality to a person or persons, a popular request on amulets, but not on curses; (ii) the importance of two underappreciated parallels to the Tongres tablet (a second-century lead disk from Bordighera and a drawing in a papyrus recipe for a tin amulet); and (iii) the shape of a shrine or aediculum at the very center of the design, which points to a Greek tradition of house amulets in the shape of little shrines.