In a Roman Tomb, ‘Dead Nails’ Reveal an Occult Practice

When it came to the cure of illnesses, the historical Romans experienced no lack of magical solutions, many of which involved iron nails. To overcome epilepsy, the first-century historian Pliny the Elder encouraged driving a nail into the ground at the spot wherever the afflicted person’s head lay at the start out of the seizure. The Romans hammered nails into doorways to avert plagues and pounded coffin nails into thresholds to hold nightmares at bay. Nails from tombs and crucifixions had been from time to time even worn around the neck as talismans in opposition to fevers, malaria and evil spells.

Recently, archaeologists excavated an unconventional set of talismanic nails from a mountaintop necropolis on the outskirts of Sagalassos in southwestern Turkey. In an early Roman imperial tomb, 41 damaged nails ended up located scattered amongst the cremated remains of an adult male who had lived in the second century A.D. and was buried in situ. 20-five of the nails were headless and intentionally bent at appropriate angles the other folks were total roundheaded nails with the shanks twisted numerous instances. The strange funerary exercise is the issue of a new review posted in the journal Antiquity.

“The nails have been not made use of in the design of the pyre, and had no simple objective,” stated Johan Claeys, an archaeologist at Catholic University Leuven and the lead author of the paper. “They would have been important enough to be recovered if still serviceable. But they were being dead nails, and the way they were being dispersed all-around the perimeter of the tomb implies that the placement was purposeful.” By “dead nails,” he intended that they experienced been believed to possess occult energy.

At the time, the ashes and unburned remnants of cremated bodies had been normally set in an urn and buried in a grave or put in a mausoleum. In this scenario, the pyre was thoroughly sealed beneath a raft of two dozen bricks, arranged in four rows. The undersides of the bricks were being discolored, indicating that they had been set atop the however-smoldering embers. The bricks have been then slathered with slaked lime.

“This wasn’t the slim, short-term layer ordinarily employed to include the skeletal stays prior to they were recovered for burial,” Dr. Claeys claimed. “This lime was thick and secured the remains as considerably as a stable coffin would have.” Lime, he claimed, was seldom applied in the course of Roman-period interments. In fact, of the 180 or so tombs that his staff examined at the cemetery, this was the only one that had been limed.

Each and every of these 3 options — the nails, the bricks and the lime — has been uncovered in other graves in the ancient Mediterranean, but this was the to start with time they experienced been found collectively, Dr. Claeys mentioned. This strongly implied the use of protective charms to keep the “restless dead” from interfering with the living, he reported.

“Whether or not the result in of the man’s death was traumatic, mysterious or the result of a contagious disease or punishment, it appears to have still left the mourners fearful of his return,” he explained. “We are witnessing below at minimum three deviant interventions that every single in and of on their own can be understood as suggests to pin the deceased to his ultimate resting situation. The blend swings the pendulum firmly towards safeguarding the residing from the useless.”

The new examine provided sizeable evidence that “protective magic” was applied in Imperial Rome necropoli, said Silvia Alfayé, a professor of historical background at the College of Zaragoza, Spain, who was not involved in the venture. “The Sagalassos cremation tells us a personal but also social story of treatment, hope, contempt, respect, grief and anxiety going through reduction,” she explained. “It reveals the option of magic as the most suitable ritual technological innovation to take care of death anxiety and phantom menaces.”

Yo, Hadrian

Sagalassos was constructed on the slopes of the Taurus mountain range, about 5,000 toes earlier mentioned sea stage, in the late fifth century B.C., when the location was aspect of the Achaemenid Empire. Captured in 333 B.C. by Alexander the Wonderful on his march by means of coastal Anatolia, Sagalassos was loosely ruled from afar, if at all, by customers of his ruling clique and their descendants: Antigonus the A single-Eyed, perhaps Lysimachus of Thrace, and the Seleucids of Syria, who are credited with urbanizing the region.

By the next century B.C., Sagalassos had become a city-state of the Hellenistic Attalid Kingdom. With the death of King Attalus III in 133 B.C., the settlement was bestowed on the Roman Republic and, a century later, incorporated into the Empire. The bustling metropolis was later on favored by the emperor Hadrian (117 A.D. to 138 A.D.), who named it the regional center of the imperial cult.

In late antiquity, Sagalassos, nevertheless however dynamic and resilient, pale in value. From the sixth century A.D. on, it endured an earthquake, a economic downturn, epidemics and an invasion until it was abandoned in the 13th century. Mainly shielded from looting and vandalism by its extraordinary isolation, Sagalassos currently stays remarkably effectively-preserved, with a library, an odeon and outside theater, two huge bath complexes, a 60-place mansion, a monumental fountain and colossal statues of Hadrian, fellow emperor Septimius Severus and empress Faustina the Elder.

Archaeologists from Catholic College have been systematically excavating the space about Sagalassos since 1990. In 2011, they began a new exploration of the city’s northeastern edge, a kind of premature suburban sprawl initially committed to agricultural terracing that experienced been converted for funerary and artisanal reasons. The dig uncovered relics, intact burials and traces of cremation pyres spanning six hundreds of years.

“As Sagalassos belonged to the Greek-speaking components of the Roman Empire, lots of of their funerary practices are additional Greek in mother nature than Roman,” explained Sam Cleymans, an anthropologist at the Gallo-Roman Museum in Belgium who also labored on the new paper.

The so-known as useless nails turned up in 2012. Dr. Cleymans, then a student carrying out fieldwork at the site, remembered looking through a shorter description of nails that had been strewn all-around burials in the Roman necropolis of Blicquy in Belgium. “The account described that some have been bent and did not seem to be to have experienced a use as coffin nails,” he claimed. “The writer interpreted these nails as a way to bind the spirits of the dead to the grave to retain them from wandering all around.”

In accordance to Dr. Alfayé, the strategy powering bent and broken nails was to erect a two-way barrier that would defend both the useless and the residing.

“These rituals ended up aimed at hermetically locking the grave and securing it versus invasive threats this kind of as robbery, vandalism and witchcraft, as perfectly as blocking the achievable escape of a runaway revenant,” she wrote in an email. “In the historic Roman mind-established, nails, no matter if bent or twisted or decapitated, were being invested with magical potency. The kinds from graveyards have been considered most effective for neutralizing supernatural hurt by transferring their useless provenance to the evil and killing it.”

A coin for Charon

Nails aside, Dr. Claeys explained, the Sagalassos cremation was carried out with at least some of the conventional funerary rites that could be envisioned from ancient resources and archaeological parallels.

Despite the fact that whoever buried the man might have feared him, they clearly place treatment into the approach. The tomb was respectfully furnished with worldly products these kinds of as baskets, perfume bottles, garments, ceramic urns, vessels containing grains and nuts, and Charon’s obol, a coin put in the mouth or in close proximity to the body of the lifeless to assure safe and sound passage to the Underworld.

The researchers could not determine whether kin of the departed ended up buried nearby. Kinship generally can be established only as a result of inscriptions or DNA evaluation. None of the Sagalassos graves bore epitaphs, and genetic product is frequently ruined by high temperatures in historic cremations. “Teeth, in particular molars, are arguably the ideal source for the extraction of DNA,” Dr. Claeys claimed. “We did not get better any molars.”

On the other hand, he extra, the cremation took place near to the eastern edge of the team’s excavation trench. “Who is aware what lies just a handful of meters additional to the east?” Dr. Claeys mentioned. He is anxious that whilst extending the trench may well offer answers, it could just as easily open up a total established of new questions.

“At some point you have to make selections, ideally primarily based on investigation issues, but time and fiscal constraints will also enjoy their section,” he reported. “The basic principle is that it is better to go away the archaeological record untouched as lengthy as it is not threatened, which describes the normally restricted interventions we undertake in Sagalassos.”

Dr. Alfayé is fond of the Spanish expression “dar en el clavo” — to strike the nail on the head. “The which means is to locate the clue, learn some thing,” she claimed. In the ancient cemeteries of Sagalassos, a little something is often waiting around to be found out.