CLASSICS 330 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Curse Tablet, Libanius
Document Summary
Main idea: considering the emotional context of curse tablets. They do often involve wishes for harm and ill-luck. Curse: wishing for bad things to happen to someone. More than expression of displeasure, but a wish that someone wants to happen. But what emotions? (curses offer help for these emotions) Getting the negative emotions out to purge them; relief from negative emotions. Seems to have an angry component to it. This curse has to do with theft. Violence of the culture expressed through the context of the curse. Destroy him utterly from the human race . Both of these examples express the angry emotional process that accompanies the use of a curse. Comes from a jewish cemetery; written on a gravestone. Different religions and cultures borrow from each other. But in this example, the deities, gods, and angels that they call upon show this is representative of the jewish culture/religion. This is a very public display of grievances.
