At the start of the 20th century, archaeologists digging in Meröe, the ancient capital due of Nubia discovered a bronze head of Caesar Augustus, which had been hacked off a statue “of heroic or monumental size” and then deliberately buried in a pocket of clear sand under the steps of the temple of Victory, one of the chief buildings of the royal palace. This great hall is decorated with frescos showing the Nubian king and queen in scenes of ceremony and triumph. More than a half millennium later, during the renovations of a synagogue in the northern Galilee, a man named Yose, inscribed a bronze tablet in Hebrew and Aramaic with a plea to Jahweh to “suppress” the inhabitants of the town, and he placed this tablet under the new threshold of the synagogue. How does one explain these two bronze items buried before or under the thresholds of important public buildings and dating roughly 600 years apart? As the presenter explains the answer lies in a centuries old tradition that begins in Pharaonic Egypt and aims at magically surpassing one’s enemies by burying images of them or their names beneath or before a threshold, where the constant foot traffic in and out of the building will trample the effigy or names of the victims and keep them continually underfoot.
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