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What Were Ancient Greco-Roman Curse Tablets?

15 pointsby speckxlast Tuesday at 3:56 PM11 commentsview on HN

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rapidaneurismtoday at 6:20 PM

https://archive.ph/Kqh0h

It seems to redirect based on location, and the article cannot be accessed

SockThieftoday at 4:26 PM

That link forcefully redirects me to different site: https://historytv.pl/

Despite me blocking scripts, mind you.

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virgil_disgr4cetoday at 4:47 PM

> Archaeologists have recovered more than 1,500 of these historic hexes that were secretly directed at rivals

If only we had the ancient greco-roman newspapers archived so we could check and see if any of the hexes worked

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shaetoday at 7:00 PM

Curse Tablets are early LLM skills?

joe_mambatoday at 5:16 PM

Return the slab.

Or suffer my curse.

yieldcrvtoday at 4:50 PM

> The idea behind curse tablets is that my situation will improve if I can ‘bind’ somebody, make them unattractive, ineffective in speech, make their chariot wheel fall off

hmm, well, has anybody tried it? binding a curse on lead sheet to make a chariot wheel fall off?

everyone that manifests, or prays, or wishes become enamored with their chosen concept when a tangentially related improbability occurs that they retroactively assign to their wish. the predictive quality is zero but the retroactive attribution feels good, and the failures are attributed to yourself for not manifesting, praying or wishing hard enough - or building a value system more congruent with the metaphysical framework.

I’m curious why they fell out of disuse? Just the fall of the roman empire?

Seems like a resurgence in magical thinking could make these really popular. There is a high chance that all religious and magic beliefs were made more palatable to appeal to broader populations, so the “true” version would seem both archaic and lost to time, there is demand for hints at what may be the true thing.

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