Curse tablets at Ephesus are what visitors expect and nobody can show them: of the roughly 1,600 ancient curse tablets known today, we could not find one published from Ephesus itself. What the city left instead is carved in stone: a grave guarded by a 1,000-denarius fine, Medusa faces, and six magic words that carried its name across the Greek world.
That is not the same as saying nobody in Ephesus ever cursed a neighbor. It means the evidence you can actually stand in front of is different from the lead sheets in the museum cases at Athens or Bath, and in some ways stranger.
Were curse tablets found at Ephesus?
No published curse tablet from Ephesus itself has turned up in the sources we checked, although about 1,600 are known from the ancient world. Ephesus's own protective magic survives in stone instead: tomb inscriptions threatening fines, Medusa faces on tombs and buildings, and the famous Ephesian Letters.
The gap is probably an accident of digging rather than proof of good manners. Curse tablets were made to be hidden: rolled or folded, then pushed into graves, dropped down wells and springs, or left in the sanctuaries of underworld gods.
Only a fraction of the cemeteries of Ephesus has been excavated, as we explain in what is still buried at Ephesus. If one is published, this answer changes.
What is a curse tablet?
A curse tablet is a thin sheet of lead scratched with a name and a request to the gods, or to the dead, to "bind" that person: a rival in a lawsuit, a charioteer, a thief, a lover who had moved on. Greeks called them katadesmoi, binding spells. Romans called them defixiones.
The nearest well-known group from this coast comes from Knidos, at the tip of the Datça peninsula. In 1857 and 1858 the British archaeologist Charles Newton found lead tablets in the sanctuary of Demeter there, which he dated to roughly 300 to 100 BC.
In one, a woman named Antigone, accused of trying to kill a man called Asklepiades, asks Demeter to punish her if the charge is true and to punish her accuser if it is not. If she is innocent, she asks to be free to share a bath and a table again.
That is the tone of most ancient cursing: less horror film, more small claims court with a goddess as judge.
Ephesus tomb curses: fines, gods and a guild of silversmiths
Ephesians defended their dead mostly with money. The clearest case is the grave of Marcus Antonius Hermeias, a silversmith and one of the neopoioi, the officials of the Temple of Artemis, and his wife Claudia Erotis. It dates to the reign of Claudius, AD 41 to 54, or a little later.
The inscription bans anyone else from the tomb. Whoever dares to put a body in it, or to chisel out the text, must pay 1,000 denarii to the silversmiths of Ephesus, and the silversmiths' guild itself looked after the grave.
Hermeias worked in the same trade as Demetrius the silversmith, who started the riot against Paul in Acts 19, and in roughly the same decades.
Elsewhere in Roman Asia Minor, epitaphs went further. They threaten anyone who disturbs the grave with blindness, childlessness, a burned house or an early death. Some set the fine payable to a god's treasury; others place the tomb under the eyes of Helios and Selene, the sun watching by day and the moon by night.
Christians kept the habit. At Eumeneia, inland in Phrygia, a family grave warns that anyone who buries a stranger there "will have to reckon with the living God". For the cemeteries of Ephesus themselves, from the harbor graves to the gladiators, see the graveyards of Ephesus.
Our archaeological Ephesus tour is the slow version of the site: five to six hours, private, with time for inscriptions, the Medusa over the Temple of Hadrian's door and the Terrace Houses that faster tours squeeze in. Tickets are bought in advance so you skip the line; the ticket cost is paid separately.
Send us your date through the booking page or at info@ephesustoursbylocals.com.
TÜRSAB 15746 · private only · no prepayment to ask.
Medusa on the tomb: the face that turned robbers away
Words were one defense and faces were another. Sarcophagi across Roman Asia Minor, Ephesus included, carry the head of Medusa, the Gorgon whose stare turned men to stone. The usual reading is that she is apotropaic: there to turn away anyone who came to rob the dead, and any evil that came for them.
You can see the same idea above a door on Curetes Street. Step into the porch of the Temple of Hadrian and look up at the inner lunette: a female figure rises out of acanthus leaves, usually identified as Medusa, guarding the entrance the way she guarded the graves.
Magic in ancient Ephesus: the Ephesian Letters
If Ephesus exported any magic, it was words, not lead. The Ephesia Grammata, the Ephesian Letters, were six words: askion, kataskion, lix, tetrax, damnameneus, aision. They mean nothing in Greek or any other known language, and their power was believed to lie in saying them correctly.
A late source, Pausanias the lexicographer quoted by Eustathius, says they were written faintly on the feet, girdle and crown of the statue of Artemis at Ephesus.
The words traveled. The oldest known version comes from a damaged inscription at Himera in Sicily, made before Carthage destroyed the town in 409 BC, and a variant is written on a lead tablet from Phalasarna on Crete. So the closest thing to an "Ephesian lead tablet" was found on another island, carrying the city's words as protection rather than a curse.
Later stories, collected in the Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda, say King Croesus recited the Letters on his funeral pyre and was saved, and that an Ephesian wrestler at Olympia could not be thrown while he wore them on his ankle. A judge found them and took them off, and he lost three times in a row.
For the goddess at the center of all this, see Artemis of Ephesus.
The magic books of Acts 19
The New Testament gives Ephesian magic its most famous scene. Acts 19 says that many who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them in public, and the value came to fifty thousand drachmas. With a drachma as a typical day's pay, that is well over a century of a laborer's wages in one fire.
Many scholars think the scrolls were handbooks of exactly the spells the city was known for.
The verse is unpacked line by line on Acts 19:19 and the burning of the magic books. If you want to follow Paul's footsteps through the ruins, our route is in walking where Paul walked.
Where to see tomb curses and Medusa at Ephesus today
In the ruins, none of this needs an extra ticket, only slower walking. Sarcophagi lie in the open in several parts of the lower city; look at the garlands, the ox skulls and any faces between them. The Temple of Hadrian is halfway down Curetes Street, on the main route through the site.
The Ephesus Museum in Selçuk, about 3 kilometers from the ruins, holds the Great Artemis, gravestones of the city's gladiators and the sarcophagus from the Belevi Mausoleum, the great Hellenistic tomb near Selçuk.
One later building shows what Christian Ephesus thought of the old warnings. The Church of Mary, built in the early 5th century and the meeting place of the Council of 431, had its courtyard paved with Roman gravestones. Most were first-century epitaphs, probably taken from the harbor cemetery, many with the text scraped or cut away.
About fifteen years later, a law of AD 447 banned taking stone from tombs, with harsher penalties for clergy.
To read a name off a grave yourself, our guide to reading a Roman inscription without knowing Latin covers the formulas and the chiseled-out gaps. And if you would rather have a guide point these things out, our in-depth archaeological day is built for exactly this kind of slow looking.
Questions readers ask
What were curse tablets made of?
Mostly lead. Thin lead sheets were cheap and easy to scratch with a point, and they were often rolled up or folded before being hidden in a grave, a well or a sanctuary.
What were the Ephesia Grammata?
Six magic words, askion, kataskion, lix, tetrax, damnameneus and aision, named after Ephesus and used across the Greek world as protective charms. People spoke them aloud or carried them written on amulets.
What does Ephesia Grammata mean?
"Ephesian Letters". The name points to the city; the six words themselves have no meaning in Greek, and ancient writers already argued over them. Clement of Alexandria records one attempt to read them as darkness, light, earth, the year, the sun and the Word.
How much were the magic books in Acts 19 worth?
Fifty thousand drachmas, according to Acts 19:19. With a drachma as a typical day's pay, that is well over a century of a laborer's wages, burned in a single public fire.
Did Ephesians curse tomb robbers?
Yes, though mostly with money. The silversmith Hermeias's grave demanded 1,000 denarii from anyone who reused it or erased its text, payable to the silversmiths' guild. Elsewhere in Roman Asia Minor, epitaphs also called on the gods to punish violators.
Is the Ephesus Museum on the same ticket as the ruins?
No. The museum is in Selçuk town, about 3 kilometers from the ruins, and has its own ticket; a combined Ministry ticket is sometimes on sale. Check current prices and hours on the entrance fees page before you go.
Sources: Curse tablet and Ephesia Grammata (Wikipedia); IEph 2212, grave of Hermeias with fines payable to the silversmiths (Philip Harland, Associations in the Greco-Roman World); C. T. Newton (1863), Knidos lead tablet no. 81 (IKnidos 147); M. Skotheim, Spolia and Epigraphical Erasure at the Church of Mary in Ephesus; Acts 19:19. Written by the Gezginol Travel guiding team. Last reviewed: October 2026.
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