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Lead Tablets and the Questions Pilgrims Asked

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Lead Tablets and the Questions Pilgrims Asked

What people at Dodona actually wanted to know survives on lead, folded up and posted to a god like a letter.

Questions on lead sheets

Excavations beginning with Constantinos Carapanos in the 1870s, and continued by Greek archaeologists into the twentieth century, recovered several thousand small lead tablets from the sanctuary. Petitioners scratched a question to Zeus Naios and his consort Dione, folded the sheet, and left it for an answer. The questions are strikingly ordinary: whether a marriage would go well, whether a business venture would pay off, whether a child was really the questioner's own, which god to sacrifice to for better health.

Reading a yes or no from an oak

Tradition, recorded by later Greek writers, held that priestesses called peleiades interpreted the rustling of leaves in a sacred oak, or the sound of wind through bronze vessels hung in the tree, as the god's response. The lead tablets suggest most answers were narrow, often effectively yes or no, matching a method suited to reading a sound rather than composing verse.

Older than Delphi's fame

Dodona's oracle is described by Homer, making it among the oldest oracular sites named in Greek literature, though it was Delphi that came to dominate panhellenic religious authority in the historical period that followed.

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