A fiery ancient Greek curse inscribed on two sides of a thin lead tablet was about a greengrocer some 1,700 years ago in the city of Antioch, researchers have determined.  The tablet holding the curse was dropped into a well in Antioch, then one of the Roman Empire's biggest cities in the East, today part of southeast Turkey near the border with Syria.

The artifact in the Princeton University Art Museum was discovered in the 1930s by an archaeological team but had not previously been understood until The text was translated by Alexander Hollmann of the University of Washington. The curse calls upon Iao, the Greek name for Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament, to afflict a man named Babylas; "O thunder-and-lightning-hurling Iao, strike, bind, bind together Babylas the greengrocer," reads the beginning of one side of the curse tablet. "As you struck the chariot of Pharaoh, so strike his [Babylas'] offensiveness."

The translation is detailed in the most recent edition of the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.

Curses! Secret of ancient imprecation revealed By Owen Jarus