Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Could this strange contraption

really see into your soul?

WEST: The idea that you could just put something

on someone's head and then suck out

all the measures of personality from them --

wouldn't that be fun?

NARRATOR: Why was the wearer of this

weird gold mask treated so bizarrely?

ESCOLANO-POVEDA: He was placed upside down with

his head separated from the body.

NARRATOR: And what is so odd about this ancient Greek jar?

MacDONALD: There's every reason to believe

that this combination of pot

and sacrifice and iron nail are part of an act of

dark magic.

NARRATOR: These are the most remarkable

and mysterious objects on earth.

Hidden away in museums, laboratories, and storage rooms.

Now, new research and technology

can get under their skin

like never before.

We can rebuild them,

pull them apart,

and zoom in to reveal

the unbelievable, the ancient,

and the truly bizarre.

These are the world's strangest things.

In Minnesota's Science Museum

sits one of the strangest devices ever invented.

This is a completely bizarre contraption.

NARRATOR: Now, using cutting-edge technology,

we can bring this unique object to life.

This is the psychograph.

Consisting of nearly 2,000 individual parts,

it looks like some kind of robotic hairdryer.

BALL: There's a dome that comes down from a pole

over the head, and that's attached to a mahogany box,

and then there are electrical connections

going from this device into the box.

NARRATOR: Within the dome are 32 tiny,

twisted steel probes mounted on pivots.

They are designed to press up against the skull.

Its creator claims this allows it to accurately

calculate your psychological strengths and weaknesses.

It's supposedly capable of revealing

not just what kind of person you are,

but the kind of job that you should do.

NARRATOR: When it is unveiled to the public,

it becomes a sensation, with people clamoring

to get their head read, but can it really work?

Where does the idea for it come from?

And how does a scientific device

end up in a shopping mall?

Wisconsin, 1901.

Inventor and self-proclaimed profound thinker,

Henry Charles Lavery,

begins working on plans for a revolutionary machine.

Lavery is essentially an auto mechanic by trade,

but he's got big dreams, and he earned a name

for himself as the Thomas Edison of Superior, Wisconsin.

NARRATOR: Lavery believes this new machine

will change the world, because it will be

capable of reading and judging someone's personality.

BELLINGER: The premise of this contraption was that it could

measure the shape of

an individual's head and spit out a reading

based on measurements that varied one or two ticks above

or below normal and would

thereby reveal this person's nature, their intelligence.

WEST: Fundamentally,

the idea is that certain thoughts, attitudes,

behavior patterns, talents,

they're linked to structures in the brain.

NARRATOR: In 1931, nearly 30 years

after Lavery first came up with the idea,

he reveals the finished machine.

He goes big on the name and calls it the psychograph.

Where did he get the idea for such a bizarre device?

Ancient Greece, over 2,000 years ago.

Philosophers like Pythagoras and Aristotle are

championing the idea that you really can judge a book

by its cover.

It's called physiognomy.

BELLINGER: Physiognomy is the belief that there's

a direct correlation between

one's outward physical appearance and one's inward

intellectual capability and personality.

NARRATOR: Sounds crazy, but it's actually

something everyone does without realizing it.

Human beings like to be able to make judgments

fairly quickly.

And one of the easiest ways to do that is to look at someone

and see how much you like the way they look and then

extrapolate quite a lot about them in other ways.

That's a normal thing for humans to do, even if it isn't

a very accurate thing for humans to do.

NARRATOR: Unsurprisingly, physiognomy's popularity grows

over the centuries,

and it gives rise to some very weird ideas.

BALL: During the 16th century,

an Italian scholar called Giambattista della Porta wrote

a book called Human Physiognomy,

in which he drew comparisons

between human features

and features of various animal species,

and he would suggest that there were similarities,

behavioral similarities, between these two types.

NARRATOR: For example, he suggests that looking like

a sheep means you have a sheep-like personality,

an animal he believes is stupid and wicked.

The psychograph is based on an evolution of this idea first

proposed in the 18th century by German physiologist,

Franz Joseph Gall.

BELLINGER: Gall's ideas emerged

from his own experience as a schoolboy,

in which he observed that his classmates with the most

bulging eyes and prominent foreheads

seemed to have the best memory and recall.

Gall drew the conclusion that there must

be some organ of memory that resided in the skull right

behind the eyes, which would cause it to protrude.

NARRATOR: Gall decides that the brain

is divided into 27 independent regions.

BALL: Gall believed that the brain

was actually a composite organ,

that it was made of many different smaller organs

and that each of these

somehow governed different aspects of our

character and our personality and our behavior.

And the sizes of these different regions would be

indicative of how much a person held onto each of those traits.

NARRATOR: Gall believes that the larger the region,

the more it changes the skull shape,

creating lumps and bumps on the surface

that can be measured,

exactly what the psychograph does with its tiny levers.

By the early 19th century, Gall's idea

has acquired a very scientific name -- phrenology.

Getting your head read with a giant set of calipers

becomes all the rage among the elites of European

high society,

while in America, brothers Lorenzo and Orson Fowler

turn it into a business empire.

The Fowler brothers created the phrenological cabinet,

and they had thousands of skulls of shady characters,

ranging from known criminals to pirates,

and they offered readings to the general public,

who could come in and pay for the privilege of being told

what kind of person they were based on their skull.

NARRATOR: Phrenology attracts

celebrity fans like American poet Walt Whitman,

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

and the great inventor, Thomas Edison.

But there is a dark side to the idea

behind the psychograph.

Amongst the skulls in the Fowler Brothers collection was one

that had belonged to

an Apache chief named Mangas Coloradas, who had been first

tortured and then killed by American soldiers.

And they alleged that it showed characteristics

of indigenous Americans

that set them apart from white European settlers.

And so the whole science of phrenology was very much caught

up with this deeply racist undercurrent

of thinking about human races.

NARRATOR: Ignoring these disturbing controversies,

inventor Henry Lavery sees a business opportunity.

He's going to sell phrenology to

companies so they can select perfect employees.

But the old-fashioned manual approach is

a poor fit for his new business model.

BELLINGER: First of all, it was very time consuming

but perhaps more importantly, it's really subjective.

His idea was, let's actually make

a device which can automate this process.

It can do it faster and more accurately

and more consistently.

Hence the psychograph was born.

NARRATOR: Lavery claims his bizarre new contraption can

take an accurate reading in just 90 seconds,

but has he really made a machine that can do that?

NARRATOR: This weird contraption claims

to scientifically measure your personality.

How on Earth can it do that?

A helmet was brought down over the head,

there was a knob on the front to tighten it, and then inside

the helmet, there were 32 probes

that would move to 32 different parts of the cranium and would

make measurements that would allegedly reveal the scores for

these different 32 personality characteristics,

things like sense of humor, covetousness, combativeness.

NARRATOR: As the metal probes pivot to match

the shape of the skull,

they connect to one of five different electrical contacts.

So each of these 32 probes would measure

basically a bump on the skull

and see how big it was and would send that signal to

the recording device.

So for a small bump, you'd get a readout of one.

If it's a bit bigger, it was two, and so on

on this five-point scale.

NARRATOR: When the subject is in place,

the operator flicks a switch,

activating a belt-driven motor that drives the printer in

the wooden box.

The printer receives a signal

from each of these 32 sensors

and stamps out the appropriate number

from 1 to 5, consecutively

for each of these personality traits.

NARRATOR: Five possible readings from each of the 32 probes

gives an almost unlimited number of

possible profiles.

The results appear on a 16-inch-long

ticker tape roll of paper.

BALL: It wasn't just giving you

a kind of objective assessment of your personality.

It was dispensing vocational advice.

So it was telling you what kinds

of jobs you might be suited for.

You know, whether you might be best suited

to being a hotel manager or even a prizefighter.

NARRATOR: It looks deeply impressive.

But what's the real science behind Lavery's strange machine?

Can you really measure someone's personality

from the bumps on their head?

When Gall talks about the brain being divided

into regions, he isn't completely crazy.

BALL: If you think about those porcelain figurines

that were made of the skull,

divided into various areas, labeled with different aspects

of personality,

there's something in that that resonates with

a more modern view of understanding the brain itself,

and this was something that really started to be

appreciated in the mid-19th century,

in particular in the 1860s with the work of

the French physiologist, Paul Broca.

NARRATOR: Broca discovers that all of his stroke patients

that have difficulty speaking

have damage to the left frontal region of the brain.

He concludes correctly that this area

controls our ability to speak.

MAN: The white area

that's shown here in the black area,

it's a different way of seeing it.

That's a devastating stroke.

This part of the brain is now known as Broca's Area,

but this is not the same as Gall's leap to defining all

personality from brain shape.

WEST: It is true that there are different parts of the brain

that correspond to different

parts of our minds, if you want to put it that way,

but it's not in the same neat, packaged way

that Gall was proposing -- that part isn't true.

NARRATOR: Even in Gall's day,

a century before the psychograph sees the light of day,

phrenology is already viewed with enormous suspicion.

BALL: One of the problems that phrenology had is that there

wasn't any consensus about

which parts of the brain dealt with which particular function,

which particular personality trait.

And there wasn't any consensus about what those traits were.

NARRATOR: But there is an even more fundamental problem with

Gall's ideas.

BALL: The real problem with phrenology is that the shape

and thickness of the skull

bears no obvious relation to the brain it's encasing.

It can vary for all sorts of reasons.

WEST: The idea that you could just put something on someone's

head and then suck out all the measures of personality

from them, wouldn't that be fun?

It's a nice idea, even if not a very credible one.

NARRATOR: By the turn of the 20th century,

phrenology has been almost completely debunked by science.

So why does Henry Lavery then spend

30 years building the psychograph?

The fact that science doesn't

support the psychograph is almost irrelevant.

Lavery isn't planning to sell it to scientists.

BELLINGER: We start to see these psychograph machines popping

up everywhere -- in the lobbies of cinemas,

in department stores, in cruise ships,

I mean, even in doctors' offices.

They become a bit of a form of public entertainment with this

kind of false promise of

enlightening people about themselves.

NARRATOR: In 1934, the psychograph is even

exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair.

But it isn't alongside

the other technological innovations of the age.

BELLINGER: It's over with the freak shows in between

the Ripley's Believe It or Not exhibition and the flea circus.

It's been relegated to

the sphere of pseudoscience, to popular entertainment.

NARRATOR: Up to 45 machines are built,

but in 1938, the psychograph bubble finally bursts,

and Lavery is forced to mothball his machines.

The psychograph may have died in obscurity,

but the ghost of phrenology lives on.

Its ideas have permeated into our language to some degree,

they're still there,

so when we talk about, for example, things being

highbrow and lowbrow,

that's a reflection of the old idea that the shape of our brow

was somehow connected to our intellect.

And if you had a low brow,

you were less intelligent than if you had a nice sort of

high forehead.

NARRATOR: So, despite its controversial past,

the idea behind this bizarre machine

is the pseudoscience that refuses to die.

In a display case at a museum in Northern Peru is

a strange mask with a distorted and heavily

decorated human face.

The quality of the craftsmanship is outstanding.

NARRATOR: But brand-new analysis has led experts

into a dark world of macabre ancient rituals.

DODDS PENNOCK: This new research just added

an amazing new dimension to our understanding.

NARRATOR: Now, using cutting edge digital technology,

we can examine this strange relic in microscopic detail.

This is the Sican Mask.

Fashioned from solid gold,

it measures 18 inches by 11 inches,

and at the center of the unusually shaped eyes are

beads made from polished amber and emeralds.

It's decorated with a nose clip

and intricate ornamental earrings.

Just from looking at the craftsmanship, we can tell

it's incredibly valuable.

NARRATOR: It is painted a vivid red,

the color still bright

a thousand years after it was made,

and there is a gruesome reason for that.

Who made it? What was it for?

And what makes the new research so grisly?

NARRATOR: Northwest coast of Peru,

the Pomac Forest, 1991.

A team led by Professor Izumi Shimada

is on an archaeological dig.

This area is one of only four areas in Peru

designated as of special historical interest

and protected for that reason.

NARRATOR: Beneath the tropical dry forest lie 36 manmade mounds

spread across 23 square miles.

It is all that remains of

a lost civilization that flourished along Peru's

north coast.

It disappeared more than 600 years ago.

They are called the Sican.

Shimada's excavation focuses on

a temple mound known as Huaca Loro,

and at the bottom of a 36-foot-deep vertical shaft

they find the motherlode,

an untouched Sican tomb packed with riches.

DODDS PENNOCK: They recover over a ton of grave goods,

about a third of which are made of metal.

NARRATOR: The treasures include crowns,

gold feather head ornaments,

gold earrings, and a gold ceremonial knife.

But they also find the bodies of two women and two children.

They are arranged around a fifth body

in the center of the tomb.

DODDS PENNOCK: He is laying on the remains of a robe

that was covered with hundreds of tiny gold squares.

He has elaborate gold shin ornaments, as well as

a big chest piece made of inches deep of beads.

A reconstruction reveals how the women

and children were positioned around this man.

Each seems to have been placed in very bizarre poses.

But strangest by far is the man at the center.

He was arranged in a seated position.

His body was painted red.

NARRATOR: That's not what is strange.

He was placed upside down

and with his head separated from the body.

The head has been removed and rotated to 180 degrees

so it's upright.

NARRATOR: And covering the decapitated head...

the weird red mask.

DODDS PENNOCK: The mask is made of gold.

It has very delicate, beaded eyes

made from different kinds of stones

so you see the pupil staring out from the mask

at you, but what's most striking is this bright

red paint in which it's been daubed.

It really gives the mask this depth of color,

which has been preserved incredibly

through the centuries.

NARRATOR: And these details hide a gruesome

secret that has only just been discovered.

The mask is 1,000 years old.

It is made from a single gold alloy sheet

just 200ths of an inch thick.

It is a perfect example of the skill of Sican craft.

In shaping the mask,

there's a real kind of balance to be struck between, you know,

keeping it thin enough,

but on the other hand strong enough to maintain the features.

NARRATOR: The iris and pupil are formed

from large pierced amber and emerald beads.

The finishing touch was to add the distinctive red paint.

SELLA: That stunning red color

actually comes from a mineral called cinnabar,

and it's the sulfide of mercury.

NARRATOR: Cinnabar has been highly prized as a precious

resource by many different cultures

around the globe for at least 12,000 years.

It's a fabulous dye and therefore is often used to

evoke importance through ideas about blood and rulership

and fertility in particular -- we know that

the Romans used it in triumphal processions.

NARRATOR: Many statues in antiquity were

originally decorated with bright red colors.

But this mask is different.

There is something very dark beneath its gaudy paint.

SELLA: The whole idea of a paint is that

you're going to apply a color across a surface.

And for that, you're gonna need, first of all, a pigment.

That's the substance which actually

gives rise to the color.

NARRATOR: In the case of the mask,

that is the red mercury salt, cinnabar.

You're then going to need some kind of liquid medium,

which allows it to flow so that

you can spread it around, and finally,

you're gonna need some kind of binder, which will hold it

together once you've applied it to the surface.

NARRATOR: But new research has revealed something

completely unexpected.

In 2021, a study was done to actually analyze

the composition of the red material on the surface.

They used a technique which is called FTIR.

This is an infrared technique, which actually allows

you to detect organic molecules on the surface

and identify them.

And with this, they were able

to conclude that there was protein.

NARRATOR: But it's when scientists carry out

further analysis to identify the proteins

that they discover something truly shocking.

It was both serum albumin and immunoglobulin G,

both of which are proteins present human blood.

That deep red color

comes from blood.

Human blood.

NARRATOR: Who wears a mask painted with

human blood on their decapitated head?

NARRATOR: The red paint on this 1,000-year-old mask

is mixed with human blood.

Who is the decapitated man buried wearing it?

Archaeologists have found many simple shallow graves in

communal Sican cemeteries believed to be

those of commoners.

But the tomb where the mask is found

is on an altogether different scale.

Calculations have shown that it took about two weeks to

20 people to just build the structure of the tomb.

And a lot more work went into

making all the objects that were put inside.

So quite a lot of economic value,

but also the work of many people was

invested into creating the tomb for this person.

NARRATOR: The use of gold in the mask also gives

us clues about the man buried in the tomb.

Access to refined gold, to precious metals seems

to be indicative of the very highest status.

These are the elite lords of the dynasty.

NARRATOR: As a member of this elite group,

the mask's owner would be at the center of Sican

religious practices.

DODDS PENNOCK: He would have worn a fabulous

headdress as well as the mask and gold all over,

and it's quite clear that it's designed to make a noise

when he moves, as well as to shine.

It will make this incredible jingling noise when he moves.

And so this evokes the gods, evokes divinity.

It takes people outside of the mundane and into the divine.

NARRATOR: So is the presence of human blood

on this strange mask part of a religious ritual?

And is the blood willingly given?

Or is it taken by force?

In 2011, archaeologists studying the lost

Sican civilization make a troubling discovery.

Close to where the mask was found,

archaeologists have located over 150 bodies, which were

probably sacrificed in specific rituals around these temples.

The study of the bones has

shown that there's no skeletal trauma,

so they were probably buried alive.

NARRATOR: Bioarchaeological analysis of the female skeletons

from the tomb where the mask is discovered

shows they are healthy before they die.

It suggests they may also have been sacrificed.

So why did these healthy young women have to die?

Next to the body of the man

in the center of the tomb were found the bodies

of two women.

One of them was posed as if she were giving birth.

And the other one was in a midwifery position.

NARRATOR: The positioning of the two women points

to the true purpose of this extraordinary burial.

DODDS PENNOCK: We believe that the Sican lord

is being symbolically reborn into the world,

perhaps reborn as a member of the ancestor cult,

someone who's moving on to the next

phase of life to be worshiped there.

NARRATOR: It explains why the body of the elite man

at the center of the tomb is upside down.

It's how he would be born.

There were also two children buried in the tomb,

and there have been different explanations to their presence

in there -- they could perhaps be offerings.

Perhaps they were meant to be companions for the elite member

of society after he had been reborn.

NARRATOR: Why the head of the elite man

behind the mask is decapitated remains a mystery,

but experts believe the most gruesome ingredient in

the mask's vivid red paint,

human blood, could be meant to aid the rebirth.

DODDS PENNOCK: Blood in Sican culture, it appears,

was tied to fertility and to life.

NARRATOR: So it seems likely the blood is intended

to enhance this strange ritual in some way.

So far, the striking gold mask is the only one found with

human blood,

but it's also the only one analyzed.

The discovery is so new that until other examples

are tested, no one knows if this mask is a one off

or if painting with human blood was common

in this lost culture.

Watch this space.

In a museum in Athens sits a plain-looking ceramic jar,

but this really isn't any old jar.

This jar is one-of-a-kind -- it has curses,

witchcraft, and magic.

NARRATOR: Now, using digital imaging technology,

we can examine the artifact inside and out.

It's become known as the cursed chicken pot.

It's about 4 and 1/2 inches high,

with a spherical base 5 inches in diameter,

and a handle on one side.

MacDONALD: At first glance, this is a rather unspectacular,

unglazed brown pot,

like many thousands of others found

in archaeological sites in ancient Greece.

NARRATOR: But magnify it, and it suddenly stands out,

because it's covered in faint inscriptions

in ancient Greek scratched into the clay.

This was clearly something done for a significant reason.

NARRATOR: And inside the pot, things just get even weirder.

There was actually a head of a chicken.

NARRATOR: What does the writing on the outside mean?

Why is there a decapitated chicken head inside?

Is this pot really cursed?

NARRATOR: This weird clay pot covered with inscriptions

is discovered in the Agora of ancient Athens.

ALTAWEEL: The Agora of Athens is one of the most prominent

marketplaces, industrial places of really the classical world.

Athens, in this period, is one of the greatest cities on Earth,

and the Agora is at the heart of it.

MacDONALD: The Agora was a civic center,

a place of governance, of meeting, of remembrance,

a commercial area,

the center of the ancient city.

NARRATOR: In 2006, a team of archaeologists are digging in

an area of the Agora

once used by the craftspeople of ancient Athens.

ALTAWEEL: They're excavating in the Agora in this building

that's in the heart

of the commercial area, and they come across a fairly

simple-looking jar.

NARRATOR: The jar dates to between 325 and 270 BCE.

And at first glance, it looks

like any old piece of Greek pottery.

In fact, oftentimes, we just pick them up

and sort of throw them in the bucket

without much thought, because these things

are quite common, right?

So we didn't expect this to be that fascinating.

NARRATOR: When the archaeologists look closer,

they realize there's something about this jar that is

very odd indeed.

There's actually lots of writing on it.

There's about at least 30 or so names that are legible.

There's even more names than that.

NARRATOR: Examining the pot further,

the archaeologists spot another strange clue.

The only two words that we can still make out

that aren't individual names are the words "we bind."

NARRATOR: All very weird, but not exactly groundbreaking.

It's when the archaeologists look inside the jar

that things start to turn really bizarre.

ALTAWEEL: There was actually a head of a chicken found,

and some parts of the body scattered into the jar.

NARRATOR: And if that wasn't strange enough,

the chicken isn't even the oddest thing hidden inside.

The jar has a nail that goes through it that is pierced from

the top, and it goes into the base

but doesn't shatter the jar.

NARRATOR: There is no way the nail can

have pierced the delicate clay material by accident.

The brittleness of a material like

terracotta, fired clay, is absolutely notorious.

I don't think you embed a nail

into a piece of terracotta just for fun.

If you want to pierce it in some way, you can't do it

by hitting it.

You've got to be much more subtle and effectively

wear away, drill through, very, very gently,

to ensure that you don't get the beginnings of

that crack, which will give you weakness.

And so this was clearly something done for

a significant reason.

NARRATOR: And it just gets weirder,

because there's something else in there

alongside the chicken remains and the nail.

ALTAWEEL: A small coin was found at the edge of this nail,

not legible, so it's -- it's been erased

so that you can't tell what period

or what king was even referred to,

but it seems to be of a kind of small denomination.

NARRATOR: Why would someone stuff this strange

combination of items into this pot?

If we zoom in on this digital reconstruction,

can closer inspection of the strange markings on

the surface help explain the pot's true purpose?

PLUMMER SIRES: The key to understanding the pot

is in the names that are inscribed.

Although today we can only make out

about 30 individual names,

it is very possible that, when the pot was made,

up to about 55 names were inscribed on the surface.

NARRATOR: But it's not the names that tell us

what this jar is for.

It's the other text experts have spotted,

the words [speaking ancient Greek],

ancient Greek for "we bind."

There's every reason to believe that this combination

of pot and sacrifice

and iron nail are part of an act of

dark magic,

a binding curse known as a katares.

NARRATOR: Could this weird pot really be cursed?

Did the ancient Greeks even believe in magic?

NARRATOR: It seems this ancient Greek pot containing parts of

a dismembered chicken, a nail, and a coin, is cursed.

But do the ancient Greeks really believe in dark magic?

ALTAWEEL: We think of ancient Greece as

being a society of logic, of reason,

but actually, magic, superstition, were quite common,

creating spells and potions and even prayers

against your enemies or people

you just want to have bad things happen to.

NARRATOR: Curses are used for a whole host of reasons.

MacDONALD: It was used for business purposes.

It was used to settle lawsuits.

It was used because of hatred, and in some senses,

different sorts of magic were used for love.

NARRATOR: In ancient Greek society, it seems

everyone's in on magic and curses.

MacDONALD: We know that in some cases,

city states actually commissioned certain acts

of magic.

Also, certain laws prohibited acts of magic.

So therefore, this was a system that was broadly believed in.

NARRATOR: These spells often take the form of a curse tablet.

PLUMMER SIRES: Normally, they would have been written

on a lead sheet, inscribed,

folded, and pierced with an iron nail.

The curse tablets would have then either been buried with

a deceased, because they believed

the dead person could carry the message quicker

to the gods, or they would have been

placed somewhere where

the target of the curse would have frequented.

NARRATOR: Maybe the chicken pot is some kind of a curse tablet.

It has names,

so it indicates individuals which you want to

curse, potentially.

We bind indicates that this object

is somehow pointed towards these individuals,

that the power of the curse is bounded to these individuals,

which is typical of curse tablets.

NARRATOR: The coin found inside the jar also supports this being

a curse.

The coin could be paying

the gods, effectively, to carry out the curse.

So, in a sense, you have to always do

a little bit of sacrifice to get the curse that you want.

So the coin is part of that sacrifice.

NARRATOR: But ancient Greek curse tablets don't normally

use animals.

So what's its purpose?

The chicken is what holds the entire curse together.

The commissioner or commissioners of the pot would

have tried to imbue the helplessness

and the inability to protect itself that the chicken had

onto the intended targets.

NARRATOR: And the chicken itself is significant, because

chickens originally come to Europe from distant Asia.

MacDONALD: The chicken is still an exotic animal

in ancient Greece, and as an exotic animal,

it was particularly well suited to sacrifice.

It was something out of the ordinary.

NARRATOR: But if this is a cursed pot,

who was it aimed at?

We know that the pot was found below the floor of the Agora in

a workshop, and we also know

that the curse tablets, or curse pot in this case,

they were usually buried where

the intended targets would frequent.

So it would stand to reason that this pot or this curse

has something to do with competition

within the trading guilds.

NARRATOR: What kind of curse is being

put on these craftspeople?

ALTAWEEL: Oftentimes, when you do curses

with many different names,

it's usually a judicial case, because there's lots of

individuals involved.

NARRATOR: There are lots of examples of curse tablets

used to affect the outcome of a lawsuit.

ALTAWEEL: The argument that this is a kind of curse pot,

if you will, against a competitor is supported by

the fact that curse tablets were already used in this area.

So having something like this

as another example is not surprising.

NARRATOR: Studying the names inscribed

on the jar also provides a clue.

PLUMMER SIRES: About a third of the names inscribed

on the pot belonged to women,

which is actually really interesting.

We do know that lawsuits were not uncommon during this time,

and these types of curses would

include not just the opponents in the --

in the court case, but any witnesses or supporters

of the opponents.

This might explain why there were so many women's names.

These could have been the wives, mothers,

daughters of the cursed men.

NARRATOR: But did the curse actually work?

MacDONALD: We'll never know whether or not

the curse of the ancient Agora worked,

and we're not even really sure what it was trying

to affect -- was it trying to end the business,

or was it trying to actually harm the people who might have

worked for a particular business?

But, in a sense, that doesn't matter.

What it tells us is about

the strength of belief in magic in ancient Athens.

NARRATOR: Is this innocuous-looking pot

really a curse carrier designed to inflict magical

harm on the names scored into its surface?

Dark magic is the only theory proposed

so far that holds water.