Curse in Aramaic against the Blue Team, Antioch, about 5th-6th century C.E. -- Paula Artal-Isbrand courtesy of Alexander Holman
Posted on 05/21/2018 10:04:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Chariot racing goes back thousands of years and so do attempts to fix the race... Now it turns out that not only did ancient Greeks and Romans exhort the deities to ruin their rivals' beasts: Jews were hexing the horses too and betting on their favorites. The first-ever evidence of Jewish cursing in sports was found in a rolled-up metal tablet that had been located in ancient Antioch by Princeton University researchers in the 1930s – and had been left rolled up until now. The tablet, about 9x6 centimeters in size, dated to about the 5th or 6th century C.E., according to Rivka Elitzur-Leiman, a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University who aided in deciphering the tablet, with Dr. Margarethe Folmer of Leiden University; the study is part of a broad project called "Magica Levantina" under Dr. Robert Daniel of the Institute für Altertumskunde... The tablet had been made of lead, which in and of itself indicated the nefarious purpose of its owner – to jinx... Secondly, not content with painstakingly etching the decidedly long curse in Aramaic, the gambler doubled his odds by rolling up the soft metal scroll and ramming a nail through it... Then the hexer would inter the nailed curse beneath the hippodrome race track. The idea is that the horses would activate the curse while running over it. Some bits are missing but the Jewish gambler of yore was betting against the Blue faction, one the color-coded teams that competed in the chariot races, she says. He hoped the Blue horses get mired in the mud, but mainly derived his fond hopes of divine intervention from biblical precedent.
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
Curse in Aramaic against the Blue Team, Antioch, about 5th-6th century C.E. -- Paula Artal-Isbrand courtesy of Alexander Holman
I'm reminded of the scene in the old BBC "I Claudius" where Augustus tries to get Herod Agrippa to bet on a gladiator. I couldn't find a video online.
I CLAVDIVS
I’m going to ask the same question I did the first time I read this. Did his horse win? I’d like to know.
witches tried to hex trump when he got elected-
Best series ever, set the standard.
Brilliant.
That’s my favorite song from Guys and Dolls!
No bias in THAT headline, no sir-ee BOY!...........................It’s DA JOOOOZ!......................
It’s tragic that there isn’t a vast newspaper morgue from Roman times.
:^)
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