In Roman tomb, ‘dead nails’ reveal occult practice – 03/29/2023 – Science

When it comes to treating illness, the ancient Romans were not lacking in magical remedies, many of which involved iron nails. To cure epilepsy, 1st-century historian Pliny the Elder^Oadvised to drive a nail into the ground in the place where the affected person’s head was at the beginning of the attack.

The Romans hammered nails into doors to ward off plagues, and coffin nails into doorsteps to ward off nightmares. Nails from tombs and crucifixions were sometimes worn around the neck as protection against fevers, malaria, and evil spells.

Archaeologists recently excavated an unusual set of talismans in a mountaintop necropolis outside Sagalassos in southwestern Turkey. In an ancient Roman imperial tomb, 41 broken nails were found scattered among the cremated remains of an adult male who lived in the 2nd century.^O AD and was buried there.

Twenty-five of the nails were headless and deliberately bent at right angles; the others were complete round-headed nails, the shanks twisted several times. This unusual burial practice is the subject of a new study published in the journal Antiquity.

“The nails were not used in the construction of the pyre and had no practical purpose,” said Johan Claeys, an archaeologist at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and lead author of the article. “They would have been valuable enough to recover, had they still served. But they were dead nails, and the way they were distributed around the perimeter of the tomb suggests that the placement was deliberate.” By “dead nails” he meant that they were believed to have occult power.

At the time, the ashes and unburned remains of cremated bodies were commonly placed in urns and buried in graves or placed in mausoleums. In this case, the pyre was carefully sealed under a platform of two dozen bricks, arranged in four rows. The undersides of the bricks were discolored, indicating they had been placed over the still smoldering embers. The bricks were then covered with slaked lime.

Each of those three features — the nails, the bricks and the lime — has been found in other burials in the ancient Mediterranean, but this is the first time they’ve been seen together, Claeys said. This heavily implies the use of protective enchantments to prevent the “restless dead” from interfering with the living, he said.

The new study offered significant evidence that “protective magic” was used in the necropolis of Imperial Rome, said Silvia Alfayé, a professor of ancient history at the University of Zaragoza in Spain who was not involved in the project. “The cremation of Sagalassos tells us a personal story, but also a social one, of care, hope, contempt, respect, pain and fear in the face of loss,” she said. “It reveals the choice of magic as the ritual technology best suited to dealing with death anxiety and the threat of ghosts.”

Hadrian

Sagalassos was built on the slopes of the Taurus mountain range, around 1,500 meters above sea level, at the end of the 5th century^O BC, when the region was part of the Achaemenid Empire. Captured in 333 BC by Alexander the Great on his march down the Anatolian coast, Sagalassos was ruled from afar, if at all, by members of his ruling clique and their descendants: Antigonus the One-Eyed, possibly Lysimachus of Thrace, and the Seleucids of Syria, who are credited with urbanizing the area.

in the 2nd century^O BC, Sagalassos had become a city-state of the Hellenistic Attalid kingdom. With the death of King Attalus 3^O in 133 BC, the settlement was ceded to the Roman Republic and, a century later, incorporated into the empire. The bustling metropolis was later favored by Emperor Hadrian (AD 117-AD 138), who named it the regional center of the imperial cult.

In Late Antiquity, Sagalassos, although still dynamic and resilient, lost importance. From the 6th century^O it suffered earthquake, recession, epidemics and invasions, until it was abandoned in the 13th century. Greatly protected from looting and vandalism by its extreme isolation, Sagalassos today remains remarkably well preserved, with a library, an amphitheater and open-air theater, two large bathhouses , a 60-room mansion, a monumental fountain and colossal statues of Hadrian, also Emperor Septimius Severus and Empress Faustina the Elder.

Archaeologists from the Catholic University have been systematically excavating the area around Sagalassos since 1990. In 2011, they began a new exploration of the northeast perimeter of the city, a kind of premature suburban expansion originally dedicated to agricultural terraces that were converted to funerary and craft purposes. The excavation uncovered relics, intact tombs and remains of cremation pyres spanning six centuries.

“Since Sagalassos belonged to the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire, many of its funerary practices are more Greek than Roman in nature,” said Sam Cleymans, an anthropologist at the Gallo-Roman Museum in Belgium who also worked on the new paper.

So-called “dead nails” appeared in 2012. Cleymans, then a student doing fieldwork at the site, recalled reading a brief description of nails scattered around burials in the Roman necropolis of Blicquy, Belgium. “The report mentioned that some were bent and did not appear to have been used as coffin nails,” he said. “The author interpreted these nails as a way to bind the spirits of the dead to the grave to prevent them from wandering around.”

According to Alfayé, the idea behind the bent and broken nails was to erect a two-way barrier that would protect both the dead and the living.

Coin for Charon

Nails aside, Claeys said, the Sagalassos cremation was performed with at least some of the traditional burial rites one would expect from ancient sources and archaeological parallels.

Whoever buried the man was perhaps afraid of him, but they clearly took care in the process. The tomb was respectfully decorated with earthly goods such as baskets, perfume bottles, clothing, ceramic urns, vases containing grain and nuts, and the obulus of Charon, a coin placed in or near the mouth of the dead to ensure safe passage to the dead. the underworld.

Researchers could not determine whether relatives of the deceased were buried nearby. Kinship can usually only be established through inscriptions or DNA analysis. None of the Sagalassos graves contained epitaphs, and genetic material is often destroyed by high temperatures in ancient cremations. “The teeth, especially the molars, are arguably the best source for DNA extraction,” said Claeys. “We didn’t recover any molars.”

On the other hand, he added, the cremation took place near the east edge of the team’s excavation trench. “Who knows what’s just a few feet east?” Claeys said. He worries that while widening the trench may provide answers, it will also open up a whole new set of questions.

“At some point you will have to make choices, ideally based on research questions, but time and financial constraints will also play a role,” he said. “The basic principle is that it’s best to leave the archaeological record untouched as long as it’s not endangered, which explains the often limited interventions we do in Sagalassos.”

Alfayé likes the Spanish expression “dar en el clavo” — hit the nail on the head. “The meaning is finding the clue, figuring something out,” she said. In the ancient cemeteries of Sagalassos, something is always waiting to be discovered.

^{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}