Introduction
For a long time, Greek sanctuaries were studied from a positivist perspective, that is, in terms of spatial evolution and the typologies of their architecture and artefacts, though some attention was also paid to their place within larger socio-historical contexts.Footnote 1 Further, in the past twenty-five years, de Polignac’s highly influential model has helped to account for the ways in which the development of sacred spaces at sanctuaries and temples led to the formation of political boundaries in the articulation of the polis and its territories.Footnote 2 These lines of investigation have been critical both for organizing the materials retrieved from the sanctuaries and for understanding the physical evolution of these sites, but they have revealed little about the religious experience of those who frequented ancient religious spaces.
Accordingly, scholars have begun paying greater attention to the experiences of Greek worshippers by analysing changes in the materials linked to votive practices and applying a range of approaches to Greek divinities.Footnote 3 The experiences of those who visited Greek sanctuaries have also been examined in terms of the relationship between religious institutions and individual agents and through the lens of agency and appropriation.Footnote 4 By taking into account the smells, sights, sounds and other stimuli that accompanied the visitors’ encounters with divinities and the performance of rituals, sensorial studies have also made a crucial contribution to the recreation of worship at ancient sanctuaries.Footnote 5
Adding to this recent research, this essay sheds light on the experience of visiting the sanctuary of Dodona by considering the tablets, or lamellae, found there, a class of object that was crucial to oracular activity at the site. Since the oracle at Dodona was active for centuries, worshippers left behind an enormous amount of material evidence and inscriptions, including the lamellae. Despite this mass of data, reconstructing the experiences of those who consulted the oracle presents challenges in that the material evidence cannot always be associated directly or clearly with oracular activity. The lamellae, on which the questions for the oracle were written and sometimes answered, are, therefore, clearly and directly associated with it, and provide the most important material evidence for the cult practice at Dodona. Though scholars have devoted much effort to examining these texts, they have rarely considered the materiality of the lamellae, that is, their use as material objects that were seen, touched, and transported and existed in relation to other material objects in the sanctuary. In order to help fill this gap in the literature, the present study explores the material features of the tablets and the context in which these objects were used at Dodona.Footnote 6
The Lead Tablets in the Context of the Sanctuary of Dodona
The sanctuary of Dodona, dedicated to Zeus Naios and his consort Dione, was located in Epirus, in the middle of the Tomaros Valley in northwest Greece. The site was located at a point linking the interior of Epirus with the Ambracian Gulf and southern Greece.Footnote 7 Religious activity continued there for centuries, until the fourth century CE, when Christianity became established in the area and Christians destroyed the sacred house, cut down the sacred oak and put an end to the Naia festivals in honour of Zeus.Footnote 8
It is unclear exactly when the oracle started to operate, but references to it in Homer suggest that it was active by the late eighth century BCE, at which time the cult practices would have been conducted in the open air.Footnote 9 It is equally difficult to pinpoint when the oracle ceased to operate, but it seems that, by the third century BCE, its importance had diminished and been compensated for by the establishment of the Penteteric Festival, which featured various events possibly based on those staged at the great Panhellenic sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia. Whatever the exact chronology, the oracular activity at the sanctuary clearly lasted for centuries.Footnote 10
The long history of the oracle at Dodona is associated with a site that has yielded an enormous variety of archaeological and epigraphic evidence ranging from votives to structures. As noted earlier, the wealth of available material evidence has not served to resolve the various debates about the oracle since little of it can be associated unambiguously with oracular activity. Thus, for instance, the method by which worshippers consulted the oracle, which probably changed over the centuries, remains uncertain. The flight patterns of doves there may have been interpreted as messages from Zeus,Footnote 11 and the sacred oak (drus) connected with Zeus Naios was also linked with prophecies, which were conveyed through the sound produced by the movement of its leaves in the wind.Footnote 12 The renowned tree was located in an open-air sanctuary of Zeus that was augmented with permanent structures only in the fourth century BCE.Footnote 13 The open-air sanctuary of Zeus also included other objects known for their production of sound within the cultic space. According to ancient authors, the cauldrons ‘spoke’ at the sacred site through percussive sounds.Footnote 14
Late Antique sources indicate that tripods were placed around the sacred oak so closely together that, when one of them was struck, the vibration resonated across all of them.Footnote 15 Though these sources are from a period in which the sanctuary no longer existed, the material evidence from Dodona suggests that the use of such vessels for the production of sound is not improbable since numerous tripods and fragments of them have been retrieved from the sanctuary.Footnote 16 Evidently, tripods were a common offering at pan-Hellenic sanctuaries during the Archaic period, but the various references to ‘speaking caldrons’ by ancient authors strongly suggest that those at Dodona were put to a special use.Footnote 17 Between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, when Dodona fell under the control of the Molossians, a powerful Epirotic tribe, the sanctuary’s sacred space was modified, and the first architectural structure appeared, Building E1 (see Figure 1.4, this volume) which may have functioned as a temple or treasury. Some time after 450 BCE, the open-air sanctuary was surrounded by a stone wall. According to Roman-period sources, the cauldrons surrounding the oak were replaced by a Korkyraean votive, specifically, a bronze statue of a boy on a column holding a bronze whip with three chains that swung in the wind to strike a nearby cauldron.Footnote 18 The exact role of the sound of the cauldrons in the oracle at Dodona remains a matter of debate.Footnote 19 Scholars such as Dieterle have affirmed that the sounds were consulted for oracular purposes, but the evidence is insufficient to confirm or deny this conjecture.Footnote 20 Whatever the case, as Chapinal-Heras has asserted, non-vocal natural and mechanical sounds at the sanctuary would have intensified the sense of sacredness at the site, especially in the area around the oak tree.Footnote 21
Amidst this uncertainty regarding how the oracle was consulted and the sacred space used, one absolute certainty is that the questions addressed to the oracle were written on (usually) lead tablets that were then folded and deposited within the sanctuary. Most of these tablets date to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE (more the latter than the former), though a few date to the sixth century and the last were dedicated around 167 BCE.Footnote 22 The questions are addressed mainly to Zeus, though some are directed to his wife Dione.Footnote 23 More than two thousand oracular tables were uncovered during the systematic excavations that Dimitris Evangelidis conducted at the sanctuary during his campaigns of 1929–1932, 1935 and 1952–1959.Footnote 24 The tablets consist of small sheets of lead (or, in a few cases, bronze) measuring approximately 4 × 1.25 inches. They were produced, again, from around 500 BCE until the second century BCE.Footnote 25 Most ended up in museums in Greece and a few in other museums, such as a collection of 100 at Berlin Antikesammlung.Footnote 26
While the tablets have been known for some time, their translation and interpretation have proceeded slowly because of inherent difficulties. Some lamellae are inscribed on both sides, while others are palimpsests containing texts carved successively on the same side.Footnote 27 The folding of the tablets prevented the content from being read, and, afterward, a lamella was inscribed with an abbreviation of the name of the dedicatee and a brief indication of the content.Footnote 28 The decipherment thus far has revealed that some questions could have been answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and others called for more complex responses.Footnote 29 While most consist only of questions, some consist of answers or, in rare instances, both an answer and a question.Footnote 30 A few tablets have neither questions nor answers, containing only inscriptions with references to the ethnic designation (e.g., Metapontios) or profession (e.g., Philetas tragodos) or only the name of, presumably, the visitor.Footnote 31
Regarding the content, most of the questions concern private matters, though a few deal with matters of public interest. Some include hints that they were meant for use in a lottery while others indicate that visitors tried to point to the answers that they desired or otherwise to negotiate with the gods.Footnote 32 Some of the tablets represent inquiries by official institutions, but most were deposited by individual women and men, both free people and slaves, and thus offer a window into such daily concerns as health, work, travel, the desire for children and questions of paternity, immigration, financial affairs, love and adultery, the emancipation of slaves, theft and murder, and unpaid loans.Footnote 33 The texts show that the purpose of consulting an oracle was not solely, or even primarily, to obtain a glimpse of the future. Rather, dedicatees sought the gods’ advice on specific issues, such as regarding a past action that led to suffering or the mediation of disputes.Footnote 34 Thus, consulting the oracle often involved a perceived need for action.
While the study of the texts provides insight into the identity and concerns of the worshippers, the tablets on which they were written are also important as objects for reconstructing the experiences of the ancient worshippers who, along with the priests, handled them before they were left at the sanctuary. Analyses of the unity of the material of and the writing on these objects can, then, reveal aspects of the experience of visiting the oracle that the textual content alone cannot. The following discussion addresses this gap in the scholarship by exploring the materiality of the Dodona tablets and considering, in particular, why lead was chosen to write the questions for and (occasionally) answers from the oracle, how the tablets were used in the sanctuary, the sensorial properties of the lead and how people engaged with the tablets.
Materiality and Religious Engagement in the Dodona Lamellae
Ancient inscriptions were long studied primarily as disembodied texts. Thus, antiquarians and epigraphists compiled inscriptions, extracting them from their material support without paying much attention to the characteristics of the objects on which the texts were inscribed. In the past fifteen years, however, scholars have started to pay attention not only to the semantic content of the writing but also to the physical properties of the material on which the inscriptions were written. In other words, inscriptions have come to be considered as more than texts, with consideration now being given to the broader physical contexts in which inscribed objects were placed, those for whom the inscriptions were written and those who viewed them, the spatial and archaeological contexts for their use, and the interactions between the viewers and inscribed objects. Contemporary scholars are also exploring the sensorial (visual and tactile) aspects of the inscriptions as well as the objects on which they were written.Footnote 35 Many monumental inscriptions carved on the bases of statues or sacred buildings have been studied from this perspective, and small portable objects, such as curse tablets and inscribed gemstones, have also received scholarly attention in analyses that take into account their material support.Footnote 36 A great many small objects need to be considered together with the inscriptions on them.Footnote 37 The material aspects of curse tablets have already received some attention,Footnote 38 but the tablets from Dodona have, as yet, rarely been considered for their materiality.
An obvious question with which to begin consideration of the materiality of the tablets is why most of them were written on lead, while only a few were written on bronze.Footnote 39 Lead is a by-product of silver smelting and, from the Archaic period to the Classical period, was produced in places such as Kythnos, Siphnos and, in particular, Laurion in Attica.Footnote 40 Indeed, analyses of the chemical composition of three of the tablets showed that the lead came from the latter site. Though few of the tablets from Dodona have yet been submitted to chemical analysis, comparison with the curse tablets used in magic rituals, many aspects of which have been examined may be informative, specifically, isotope analyses showing that those from Tanagra, Megara and Melos were also produced in Laurion. Since the site was the leading producer of lead, particularly in the late fifth century, it is plausible that the material from there made its way to several places in Greece, concluding Dodona.Footnote 41
Scholars attempting to explain the extensive use of lead at Dodona have pointed to the fact that it was available in great quantities and was inexpensive. The affordability of lead made it a commonly used material from the Late Archaic period onwards, not only at Dodona, for writing documents and letters as well as the large-scale production of curse tablets.Footnote 42 Further, once shaped to size and flattened, lead can be easily recycled, and its softness allows for the ready erasure of text, though traces of previous writing may remain.Footnote 43 Affordability and availability, however, do not entirely explain the choice of lead as the medium for most of the tablets at Dodona, for ceramic terracotta ostraka were even less expensive than lead and more widely available in Antiquity. The extensive use of ceramics for writing in daily life and at the sanctuaries has led scholars to refer to this medium as the ‘scrap paper of antiquity’, with thousands of examples surviving from the eighth century BCE onwards.Footnote 44 Thus, both ceramics and lead seem to have been used fairly equally for letters during the Classical period in Attica.Footnote 45 Ceramics, however, were not as common for some uses, including the curse tablets, the vast majority of which were written on lead and only a handful on ostraka. Lamont attributed the clear preference for lead in this context to its association with binding and restraining, references to which sometimes even appear in the ritual vocabulary of the curse tablets, such that the material may have been metonymic for the power of these ritual acts.Footnote 46
Returning to the tablets at Dodona, the advantages of lead as a medium – its affordability and the ease with which it can be shaped and recycled – probably played a significant role in the preference for it as the material on which worshippers wrote questions for the oracle at the sanctuary. The malleability of lead, which made it easier to write on than ceramics and easily folded and closed, was well known to the Greeks, being already mentioned in the Iliad.Footnote 47 Keeping in mind that the questions posed to the oracle were usually private and often involved delicate situations, lead had the additional advantage of allowing for discretion. Further, the malleability of the material would be an advantage if the hypothesis about the use of the tablets for commemoration discussed below is correct since the thin sheets would also be easily organized and transported within the spaces of the sanctuary.
It is unclear whether the choice of lead was related to other factors beyond these practical considerations associated with the process of consulting the oracle. Unlike the curse tablets, the texts on the lamellae at Dodona do not include vocabulary specific to the qualities of the material.Footnote 48 Furthermore, since little is known about the process of consulting the oracle and the precise role of the lamellae therein, it is difficult to ascertain whether the lamellae played a role in any of the rituals. Nevertheless, some physical qualities of the material may have enhanced the experience of writing on the lamellae since lead as a material fosters multiple sensorial experiences. The cold produced by touching it (psychros) was a well-known quality of lead,Footnote 49 and its pallid bluish-grey colour is used in the Hippocratic corpus to describe people suffering from illness.Footnote 50 Lead is also much more dense than iron, bronze or even gold, so its heft contrasts sharply with its softness. Additionally, when worshippers incised letters on tablets with a stylus, the freshly written text would have shone against the grey oxidized surface,Footnote 51 making the tablets dynamic visual objects that seemingly changed depending on how worshippers beheld them. Therefore, while holding a lamella to write on it could give rise to various sensations of the sort produced when an ancient Greek individual was writing an everyday letter, using such a material within the context of a sanctuary, where the sounds, smells and architecture were meant to enhance the encounter with the divinity, may have made the experience special.Footnote 52
Beyond these features of the material itself, the handling of the tablets on which the questions were written may have had other sensorial aspects. Because the tablets were usually small, they would have been easily manipulated by hand and kept in physical contact with the worshippers. Anthropological and psychological studies have shown that handling small portable objects that contain compressed information can create for those who do so the impression of physical enlargement and, thus, of a kind of omnipotence and omniscience. The lamellae contained a kind of compressed information in that the questions needed to be abstracted from the wider real world, and the words could be chosen and condensed to fit within the space on a tablet. Simply put, the feelings associated with the physical control of significant objects such as the lamellae may give individuals a sense of empowerment.Footnote 53
This consideration of the material features of the tablets provides the basis for an exploration of the use of these objects within the sanctuary. As noted, the history of oracular activity at Dodona covers several centuries, with the process of consulting the oracle evolving from the eighth century BCE. The fact that the first tablets appeared only in the sixth century means that, for at least two centuries, the consultation of the oracle took place without the use of tablets. Their introduction, then, is clearly linked to the implementation of a new process for consulting the oracle. When the lamellae first came into use at Dodona, the cultic practices were still performed in the open air. During the Archaic period, however, great changes occurred at the sanctuary as it transitioned from a local sanctuary to a more pan-Hellenic one.
Looking at the votives, during the Iron Age, Dodona seems to have served mainly local worshippers, receiving dedications from local elites and common people alike.Footnote 54 Even the consultation of the oracle by Odysseus, mentioned in the Odyssey, can be seen as a visit by a local since the hero’s island of Ithaka is near mainland Epirus.Footnote 55 Only in the Archaic period did Dodona start to receive more visitors. Myths and proverbs mentioning the presence of Corinthians in Epirus and the neighbouring coastal islands may hint at an increasingly broad clientele at Dodona.Footnote 56 Also observable during the Archaic period is a shift in the votives in terms of the increasing amount and variety of objects.Footnote 57 The tablets that date to the sixth century BCE, therefore, seem to be associated with the increase in visitors to the sanctuary, though the Archaic lamellae are less numerous than those dating to the subsequent centuries.
The changes at Dodona associated with this great increase in the number of tablets, then, coincide with broader changes there. Thus, the peak in the use of lamella in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE coincided with the Molossians asserting control over Dodona from Epirus. The sacred space of the sanctuary of Zeus was extensively modified at this time, including the construction of the small naiskos that was the first temple on the site.Footnote 58 A not particularly high peribolos wall (1.08 m high at its eastern end and 1.50 m at its western end) was erected to enclose the naiskos and the sacred oak, marking them as the two most important features of the cult site, and tripods, which, again, probably served to generate sound, encircled the sacred tree.Footnote 59 In the second half of the fourth century BCE, as mentioned, worshippers from Korkyra dedicated a bronze statue of a boy holding a bronze whip that made noise when the wind caused it to strike a nearby cauldron.Footnote 60 Several public buildings were also constructed at Dodona in the fourth century, including a bouleuterion and prytaneion. In the third century, the sanctuary underwent a third major round of modifications: the low peribolos was replaced with a wall and colonnades that surrounded the small temple and the sacred oak on three sides, a higher wall was built east of the oak,Footnote 61 and, towards the end of the century, a large temple was constructed on a two- or three-stepped krepis with the tripartite division into pronaos, cella and adyton.Footnote 62
Another important material aspect of the tablets is how they were used in the sanctuary, particularly their role in the divinatory process. Again, while the exact procedure for consulting the oracle using the tablets and the precise location in which the tablets were inscribed remains unclear, some conclusions seem fairly certain. To begin with, the fact that the questions written on the tablets use the present tense rather than the perfect or aorist suggests strongly that they were written before the consultation of the oracle.Footnote 63 The use of various dialects and the many grammatical and spelling mistakes further suggest that the visitors wrote the questions themselves. The implication that at least some average citizens achieved a measure of literacy is consistent with current thinking about ancient Greek writing.Footnote 64 Most likely, then, the tablets were written within the temenos of the sanctuary. Piccinini observed that, though they contain formulaic expressions, they tend not to adhere to any precise structure or phrasing, and many of them feature additions, repetitions and/or difficult syntax, likewise indicating that they were written shortly before being handed to the priests (on which more presently). Only a few tablets, such as those representing consultations by poleis and ethne, show standardized formulae, suggesting that they were written some time before consultation.Footnote 65
Moreover, while the exact use of the tablets during consultation remains unclear, given the large number of visitors to the sanctuary, it seems plausible that they were delivered to the oracle by priests. In the case of the many questions on the tablets that could be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, it is possible that a lot system was used. The fourth-century historian Kallisthenes narrates an episode involving an ape owned by the king of Molossia that tossed a pot containing tablets when Spartan ambassadors were visiting the sanctuary to consult the oracle of Dodona and mentions a procedure involving the extraction of one from a pile of tablets, each inscribed with an answer.Footnote 66 This lot system recalls some of the procedures used at Delphi to consult the Pythia. Many questions, however, were too complex to be answered simply in the affirmative or negative and required a more elaborate response, so Parker and Carbon suggested a combination of a lot system and another system at Dodona.Footnote 67 The fact that only a few tablets contain an answer from the oracle suggests that the answers may have been delivered orally in such cases.
Further, the fact that the tablets at Dodona were not found in votive deposits indicates that they were not treated by the visitors as objects with special cultic meaning. It is also unlikely that the visitors would have taken the tablets with them after consulting the oracle. Thus, while Sophocles in the Trachiniae (155–172) mentions a deltos – a rigid support for writing that can be interpreted in context as a lead tablet – given to Herakles at Dodona, archaeological research has shown that the tablets were never deposited in tombs and perhaps were not taken outside the sanctuary after being used to consult the oracle.Footnote 68 Instead, the evidence from Dodona indicates that the tablets were discarded after use, for they were found along with a great number of other items in the area of Building E1, the temple of Zeus.Footnote 69
Possibly, the tablets were deposited in a particular place or container before being transferred to a trash heap. It is not clear who was responsible for the deposition of the tablets – probably the priests – but this information cannot be extracted from the tablets. The great variety in their dimensions and in the syntax of the inscriptions on them, with little in the way of formulaic structure, led Piccinini to suggest that the tablets would not have been involved in the consultation ritual but served only as an aide-mémoire during it.Footnote 70 This suggestion is appealing, but, again, the use of present tense for the questions indicates that the tablets were written prior to consultation. So, while the tablets may not have served exclusively to assist worshippers during consultation, their powerful visual dimension could have served as a sort of memory prompt.
Further, piles of tablets in a single place could provide evidence of the frequency of consultation, that is, a visual display for visitors to the sanctuary of the large number of worshippers who had previously visited the sanctuary. Eventually, the tablets would be removed for reuse. In other words, it is possible that the tablets ended up in a deposit once they were no longer considered important for the process of consulting the oracle. There is a parallel for their collection and discarding in the Western Wall at Jerusalem, where people from all over the world deposit their prayers in writing. While the function of these prayers obviously differs from that of the questions posed to the oracle, the pieces of paper bearing them, when placed in the wall, have an additional function, namely, to serve as a visual memory of the great number of visitors to that sacred place; from time to time, they are removed from the wall and deposited in the sanctuary.Footnote 71
Conclusions
Dodona was among the most important centres for oracular consultation in ancient Greece, and the site has yielded an immense amount of archaeological and epigraphic material, including a singular class of objects, lead sheets or lamellae, that were used to write the questions posed to the famous oracle of Zeus. Scholars have tended to focus on the texts written on these objects, devoting much less attention to the objects themselves and how the visitors to the oracle would interact with them. Helping to fill this gap in the literature by building on the growing interest in the materiality of writing, the discussion in this paper has taken into account the context and properties of the lamellae. Though oracular consultation at Dodona traces back to the Iron Age, only in the Archaic period did the lamellae come into use. Their introduction at the sanctuary seems linked to its growth, with the increasing number of visitors being reflected in the types of votives along with the architectural evolution of the sanctuary. Further, certain physical qualities of lead may explain the choice of this material as the medium for the texts. While these qualities show no clear link with magic or ritual, they may have enhanced the worshippers’ experience of writing their questions for the oracle. The physical properties of the lead would have made this material suitable for use inside the sanctuary in terms of facilitating transport and hiding of a text by folding the tablet (thus maintaining the visitors’ privacy). These qualities, then, likely made lead preferable to ostraka, another inexpensive and readily available material often used for writing in ancient Greece.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Irene Salvo and Yulia Ustinova for their support and advice. My gratitude is also extended to Esther Eidinow and Hugh Bowden for the invitation to participate in this volume and for their comments and questions. Any errors that may remain are my own responsibility.
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