No time for love, Doctor Jones!

Busy at the moment, but a mini-post to help pass the time. You think of the Classical period -- you know, Greece and Rome, shit like that -- as being a period we actually know a lot about. But what you never hear about is where that information comes from. One of the things that we know about the period is that they had lots of horses, and they gave them names. But where do you think we got that list of horses' names? Baby's First Book of Greco-Roman Equestrian Names? My ass.


Where we got them from is curse tablets. These are little tablets of lead that people scratched magic spells onto and dropped down wells or buried in graveyards or whatever. Their texts are rad. And our largest source of horse-names are these tablets, where desperate gamblers or ardent racing fans have placed a curse on the horse they want to nobble in the chariot races.
It's a wonderful world. Also, cool pictures here.