The northern coast of the Black Sea has produced an abundance of documentary texts dating from the sixth through fourth centuries BC. Of great value to the epigraphist and historian are dozens of Greek letters, receipts and curses inscribed on lead and ceramic media. When placed in dialogue with one another, these texts yield new insights into daily life and literacy in communities for which literary sources are scant or absent. They document the bustling trade in saltfish, enslaved persons and textiles, and the web of relations between Greek and non-Greek individuals in north Pontic cities, from marriage to commercial ties with indigenous groups of the Pontic interior. This article demonstrates how trade could drive literacy in non-elite communities of the northern Black Sea. Literacy and mercantile activity were very much entwined, and developed in parallel with one another and with other civic and social institutions within these port communities.

This article sets out to reconsider the history of curse tablets in the ancient Mediterranean world as the history of a technology, one marked by episodes of innovation and appropriation. Attempts to write a history in terms of diffusion or of the spread of classical ideas or of magic have failed to convince, and most recent studies focus on the particularities of specific tablets or groups of tablets. This article argues that, if human and object agency are taken into account, it is possible to explain both the discontinuities in the history of curse tablets and also the shape of their thousand-year history. Curse tablets emerge as a technology the affordances of which allowed it to be put to many uses in many different social locations formed by the complex and shifting cultural contours of antiquity.

This article examines the relationship between oral traditions of cursing and the oldest Greek curse tablets from Selinous and Himera in western Sicily. As much early Greek writing is thought to record or reflect the spoken word, it is perhaps unexpected that these early Sicilian texts carry few signs of orality or speech. There are no verbs of speaking, incanting, cursing, singing, binding; no deictic language; no metre. Rather, the oldest curse tablets in the Greek world show clear signs of written literacy. Sicilian curse tablets from 500–450 bce employ verbs of writing to curse their victims (ἐνγράφω, ‘I inscribe’; καταγράφω, ‘I write down’; ἀπογράφω, ‘I enrol’), and exhibit textual distortion, scribal symbols, abbreviations, and columnar lists of names – features that ground these texts in the realm of writing. It is suggested that Greek curse practice developed alongside and in response to the spread of legal writing in the late sixth-century law courts of western Sicily.

This article deals with curse tablets against thieves, also known as ‘prayers for justice’. In the first part, I offer a short introduction to the topic and the scholarly debate surrounding the definition of this type of inscription, concluding that a more emic approach can help us understand the complex nature of a technology that, far from being monolithic, evolved over time and space. In the second part, I compare the literary and epigraphic evidence (in Greek and Latin), pointing out the similarities and differences between our different sources of information. Finally, I turn to the handful of Latin curse tablets from Roman Britain in which the stolen object's value is divided between the principal and the invoked gods. In my view, this type of transaction should be analysed as a new take on the more traditional votum, in which legal concepts such as obligatio or ownership also play an important role. By establishing an almost contractual agreement with a deity, practitioners obtained not only divine assistance but also tangible evidence of the god's participation.