When it came to the treatment of
diseases, the ancient Romans had no shortage of magical remedies, several of
which involved iron nails. To cure epilepsy, first-century historian Pliny the
Elder advised driving a nail into the ground at the spot where the afflicted
person’s head lay at the start of the seizure. The Romans hammered nails into doors
to avert plagues and pounded coffin nails into thresholds to keep nightmares at
bay. Nails from tombs and crucifixions were sometimes even worn around the neck
as talismans against fevers, malaria, and evil spells.
اضافة اعلان
Recently, archaeologists excavated an
unusual set of talismanic nails from a mountaintop necropolis on the outskirts
of Sagalassos in southwestern Turkey. In an early Roman imperial tomb, 41
broken nails were found scattered among the cremated remains of an adult male
who had lived in the second century AD and was buried in situ. Twenty-five of
the nails were headless and deliberately bent at right angles; the others were
complete roundheaded nails with the shanks twisted multiple times. The unusual
funerary practice is the subject of a new study published in the journal
Antiquity.
“The Sagalassos cremation tells us a personal but also social story of care, hope, contempt, respect, grief, and fear facing loss. It reveals the choice of magic as the most suitable ritual technology to manage death anxiety and phantom menaces.”
“The nails were not used in the
construction of the pyre, and had no practical purpose,” said Johan Claeys, an
archaeologist at Catholic University Leuven and the lead author of the paper.
“They would have been valuable enough to be recovered if still serviceable. But
they were dead nails, and the way they were distributed around the perimeter of
the tomb suggests that the placement was purposeful.” By “dead nails”, he meant
that they had been believed to possess occult power.
Unusual burial practiceAt the time, the ashes and unburned
remnants of cremated bodies were commonly put in an urn and buried in a grave
or placed in a mausoleum. In this case, the pyre was carefully sealed beneath a
raft of two dozen bricks, arranged in four rows. The undersides of the bricks
were discolored, indicating that they had been set atop the still-smoldering
embers. The bricks were then slathered with slaked lime.
“This wasn’t the thin, temporary layer
normally used to cover the skeletal remains before they were recovered for
burial,” Claeys said. “This lime was thick and secured the remains as much as a
solid coffin would have.” Lime, he said, was seldom applied during Roman-era
interments. Indeed, of the 180 or so tombs that his team examined at the
cemetery, this was the only one that had been limed.
Each of these three features — the nails,
the bricks and the lime — has been found in other graves in the ancient
Mediterranean, but this was the first time they had been seen together, Claeys
said. This strongly implied the use of protective charms to keep the “restless
dead” from interfering with the living, he said.
The new study provided significant evidence
that “protective magic” was used in Imperial Rome necropoli, said Silvia
Alfayé, a professor of ancient history at the University of Zaragoza, Spain,
who was not involved in the project. “The Sagalassos cremation tells us a
personal but also social story of care, hope, contempt, respect, grief, and
fear facing loss,” she said. “It reveals the choice of magic as the most
suitable ritual technology to manage death anxiety and phantom menaces.”
“The author interpreted these nails as a way to bind the spirits of the dead to the grave to keep them from wandering around.”
Yo, HadrianSagalassos was built on the slopes of the
Taurus mountain range, about 1.500m above sea level, in the late fifth century
BC, when the region was part of the Achaemenid Empire. Captured in 333 BC by
Alexander the Great on his march through coastal Anatolia, Sagalassos was
loosely governed 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.
By the second century BC, Sagalassos had become
a city-state of the Hellenistic Attalid Kingdom. With the death of King Attalus
III in 133 BC, the settlement was bestowed on the Roman Republic and, a century
later, incorporated into the Empire. The bustling metropolis was later favored
by the emperor Hadrian (117 AD to 138 AD), who named it the regional center of
the imperial cult.
In late antiquity, Sagalassos, though still
dynamic and resilient, faded in importance. From the sixth century AD on, it
suffered an earthquake, a recession, epidemics, and an invasion until it was
abandoned in the 13th century. Largely protected from looting and vandalism by
its extreme isolation, Sagalassos today remains remarkably well-preserved, with
a library, an odeon and outdoor theater, two large bath complexes, a 60-room
mansion, a monumental fountain, and colossal statues of Hadrian, fellow emperor
Septimius Severus, and empress Faustina the Elder.
Barrier between the dead and the livingArchaeologists from Catholic University
have been systematically excavating the area around Sagalassos since 1990. In
2011, they began a fresh exploration of the city’s northeastern edge, a kind of
premature suburban sprawl originally dedicated to agricultural terracing that
had been converted for funerary and artisanal purposes. The dig uncovered
relics, intact burials, and traces of cremation pyres spanning six centuries.
“As Sagalassos belonged to the
Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire, many of their funerary practices are
more Greek in nature than Roman,” said Sam Cleymans, an anthropologist at the
Gallo-Roman Museum in Belgium who also worked on the new paper.
The so-called dead nails turned up in 2012.
Cleymans, then a student doing fieldwork at the site, remembered reading a
short description of nails that had been strewn around burials in the Roman
necropolis of Blicquy in Belgium. “The account mentioned that some were bent
and did not seem to have had a use as coffin nails,” he said. “The author
interpreted these nails as a way to bind the spirits of the dead to the grave
to keep them from wandering around.”
“At some point you have to make choices, ideally based on research questions, but time and financial constraints will also play their part. The basic principle is that it is better to leave the archaeological record untouched as long as it is not threatened”
According to Alfayé, the idea behind bent
and broken nails was to erect a two-way barrier that would shield both the dead
and the living.
A coin for CharonNails aside, Claeys said, the Sagalassos
cremation was performed with at least some of the traditional funerary rites
that might be expected from ancient sources and archaeological parallels.
Although whoever buried the man may have
feared him, they clearly put care into the process. The tomb was respectfully
furnished with worldly goods such as baskets, perfume bottles, clothing,
ceramic urns, vessels containing grains and nuts, and Charon’s obol, a coin
placed in the mouth or near the body of the dead to ensure safe passage to the
Underworld.
The researchers could not ascertain whether
relatives of the departed were buried nearby. Kinship typically can be
established only through inscriptions or DNA analysis. None of the Sagalassos
graves bore epitaphs, and genetic material is often destroyed by high temperatures
in ancient cremations. “Teeth, especially molars, are arguably the best source
for the extraction of DNA,” Claeys said. “We did not recover any molars.”
On the other hand, he added, the cremation
took place close to the eastern edge of the team’s excavation trench. “Who
knows what lies just a few meters more to the east?” Claeys said. He is
concerned that while extending the trench might provide answers, it could just
as easily open up a whole set of new questions.
“At some point you have to make choices,
ideally based on research questions, but time and financial constraints will
also play their part,” he said. “The basic principle is that it is better to
leave the archaeological record untouched as long as it is not threatened,
which explains the often limited interventions we undertake in Sagalassos.”
Alfayé is fond of the Spanish expression
“dar en el clavo” — to hit the nail on the head. “The meaning is to find the
clue, discover something,” she said. In the ancient cemeteries of Sagalassos, something
is always waiting to be discovered.
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