The Bath curse tablets were discovered shortly after the Uley tablets but were the first to be published. Both in Bath and in Uley the work of transcribing, translating and commenting on the tablets went to Roger Tomlin. The Uley tablets were discovered in the excavations of 1977–79. The first five were published by Roger Tomlin in the Excavation Report in 1993. They are described in the report by Ann Woodward, one of its authors. Another 82 tablets were briefly described by Roger Tomlin.
Those early publications were included in Curse Tablets of Roman Britain, published by the Oxford University Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. Although it is in the process of being replaced by the full publication of all these curse tablets in Roman Inscriptions of Britain, this site is still of value.
A number were subsequently published in the journal of the Society of Roman Studies, Britannia, and are therefore available only to members. Membership of the Roman Society is a must for anyone interested at any depth in Roman Britain. It gives access to Britannia, the Journal of Roman Studies, and the whole Loeb library of Greek and Latin authors.
They were published in full by Roger Tomlin in November 2024. In due course the intention is to publish them in full on the website, Roman Inscriptions of Britain.
Tomlin, Roger S. O. The Uley Tablets: Roman Curse Tablets from the Temple of Mercury at Uley (Gloucestershire). Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
In an exchange of emails, Roger Tomlin stressed to me that it is vital that the commentary and notes of each tablet are read alongside the transcript and the translation. They have, from the outset, been designed to relate to each other. I cannot stress enough that the comments in the book are my own interpretation of the work of Bowman and Thomas, and all others who have worked on the Vindolanda Tablets and I take full responsibility for any shortcomings there may be.
Photos of the tablets are available online from the British Museum.
Three are included by Roger Tomlin in Britannia Romana, and five by Stanley Ireland in Roman Britain, a Source Book.
Tomlin, R. S. O. Britannia Romana: Roman Inscriptions and Roman Britain. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2020. 11.03; 11.04; 12.36
Ireland, Stanley. Roman Britain: A Sourcebook. 3rd edn. London; New York: Routledge, 2008, 187–88.
All those that had been published by about 2021 were included by Celia Sánchez Natalías. They are numbered SD 354–73. There are descriptions of the remaining tablets, numbered SD 374–78. Celia Sánchez Natalías modifies Tomlin’s work, developing her own commentary and using a different set of conventions in the transcriptions. Stuart McKie drew on her work, using her numbering, in the publication of his Living and Cursing in the Roman West, but does not include any of the Uley tablets in his Select Catalogue of Curses. Colleen Bradley includes fourteen of the tablets in her Romano-British Curse Tablets. Daniela Urbanová refers to only four of the Uley tablets. The authoritative work is now Roger Tomlin’s, The Uley Tablets. He has retained his original numbering. That is the basis for this study and will be the point of reference for future studies too.
Sánchez Natalías, Celia. Sylloge of Defixiones from the Roman West. Volumes I and II: A Comprehensive Collection of Curse Tablets from the Fourth Century BCE to the Fifth Century CE. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2022.
McKie, Stuart. Living and Cursing in the Roman West: Curse Tablets and Society. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Bradley, Colleen M. Romano-British Curse Tablets: The Religious and Spiritual Romanization of Ancient Britain. With Mark Bradley. Lexington, Ky: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011.
Roger Tomlin published the Bath Tablets in 1988.
Tomlin, Roger S. O. Tabellae Sulis: Roman Inscribed Tablets of Tin and Lead from the Sacred Spring at Bath. Vol. 16 fasc. 1. Monograph (University of Oxford Committee for Archaeology). Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1988.
As I was new to Latin Epigraphy, I made use of Alison Cooley’s Handbook of Latin Epigraphy. There is now an excellent introduction in the two-volume Manual of Roman Everyday Writing.
Cooley, Alison E. The Cambridge Manual of Latin Epigraphy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
The LatinNow website has many valuable resources, with open access publications. I made particular use of Alex Mullen’s Social Factors in the Latinization of the Roman West. Sadly, the other volume available here came out too late for me to use. It will be of particular interest to those interested in the local, Celtic languages, which can be glimpsed in tablets from Uley and Bath.
This book is entirely dependent on the painstaking work over many years of archaeologists, conservationists, photographers, curators, epigraphers and many more. The Uley Tablets were excavated by The Committee for Rescue Archaeology in Avon, Gloucestershire and Somerset, later renamed the Western Archaeological Trust, and subsequently by the Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit. The tablets were conserved and unrolled by Simon Dove of the Department of Prehistoric and Romano British Antiquities of the British Museum. They have been drawn, transcribed, translated and interpreted by Roger Tomlin, who published them initially in The Uley Shrines: Excavation of a Ritual Complex, one-by-one in Britannia, the journal of The Roman Society, and completely in The Uley Tablets. They are on display in the British Museum, and described in displays at the Museum in the Park, Stroud.
Since 2019, the Bloomberg Tablets and the Vindolanda Tablets have been available to all on the web site, “Roman Inscriptions of Britain,” created by Scott Vanderbilt and part of the LatinNow project. I have delighted in the photographs of the original tablets and the links to the British Museum Online Collecction’s greater range of photographs; and I have drawn extensively on the full commentary and notes that accompany each tablet. I look forward to the publication of the Uley Tablets on RIB. Displays of the tablets themselves have caught my imagination. My thanks go to Roger Tomlin for his encouragement and permission to use his work so extensively.