In a Roman tomb, ‘dead nails’ reveal an occult practice

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, the 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.

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 A.D. and was buried in situ. Twenty-five of the nails were headless and deliberately bent at right angles; the others were complete round-headed nails with the shanks twisted multiple times. The unusual funerary practice is the subject of a 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 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.

At 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 discoloured, 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,” Dr. 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, Dr. Claeys said. This strongly implied the use of protective charms to keep the “restless dead” from interfering with the living, he said.

“Whether or not the cause of the man’s death was traumatic, mysterious or the result of a contagious illness or punishment, it appears to have left the mourners fearful of his return,” he said. “We are witnessing here at least three deviant interventions that each in and of themselves can be understood as means to pin the deceased to his final resting position. The combination swings the pendulum firmly toward safeguarding the living from the dead.”

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.”