From the early third century b.c.e. onward,Footnote ¹ Sarapis and his consort Isis travelled far beyond the banks of the Nile, reaching the Aegean, Asia Minor and finally Rome, where they were interpreted and reshaped according to local idioms and religious traditions. The diffusion and localization of these deities are central themes in the study of cultural exchange, religious hybridity and the negotiation of ethnic identity in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean.Footnote ² This article contributes new evidence for the transcultural flexibility and polyvalence of Isis and Sarapis by interpreting the Delian aretalogy of Sarapis, a key inscription for the study of Egyptian-Greek religious entanglement in the Aegean, as part of a local ritual culture on Delos and elsewhere in the Cyclades. It focusses on the culminating episode in the Sarapis aretalogy: the god’s binding of his opponents’ tongues. It draws on local ritual traditions—specifically binding curses used to restrict speech in judicial and public contexts—and argues that this instance of a foreign deity’s miraculous power would have been legible to a Delian audience as an expression of a familiar ritual logic.

Drawing on inscriptional and material evidence from Delos and the wider Cyclades, I situate the divine binding within a network of locally attested curse practices. Tongue-binding curses are not unique to Delos, but their presence in the Delian archaeological and inscriptional record is significant for contextualizing and interpreting the aretalogy.Footnote ³ While priests of Sarapis emphasized their Egyptian ancestry and cultic authority,Footnote ⁴ they simultaneously articulated the god’s power in terms that resonated with local practice and cultural expectations. In this way, Delian Sarapis emerges as a god whose authority was at once ancestral for Egyptians and intimately familiar to Greeks.

The aretalogy from the cult of Sarapis on Delos (IG XI.4 1299 = RICIS 202/0101) has long garnered attention as an inscription of great value for Hellenistic social, cultural and religious history, especially migration and exchange between Egypt and the Aegean.Footnote ⁵ The text was inscribed upon a column in a privately funded Sarapieion (Sarapieion A) in the Inopos quarter at the end of the third or the beginning of the second century.Footnote ⁶ It narrates, first in prose and then in poetry, the foundation of the Sarapieion on Delos by the priest of Sarapis Apollonios II, son of Demetrios and grandson of Apollonios I, the latter of whom brought the cult to the Cycladic island from Memphis.Footnote ⁷ The extended poetic portion was composed by a certain Maiïstas (Μαιίστας) in hexameters and employs epic diction and style.Footnote ⁸

The story goes as follows. Up until that point, the devotees had worshipped in a rented room, but Sarapis appeared to Apollonios in a dream, informing him that the god needed a more appropriate place for the cult.Footnote ⁹ The younger Apollonios purchased a plot of land for a proper temple.Footnote ¹⁰ Certain Delians, displeased, sued Apollonios. According to the poetic account, they were driven by evil envy (κακὸς φθόνος, 65).Footnote ¹¹ The inscription presents the incident in dramatic terms to magnify the god’s power; this is a rhetorical construction consistent with the aim of asserting cultic legitimacy. The reasoning of those who brought the suit against Apollonios likely did not align with the intentions of the authors of the aretalogy. The legal action plausibly reflected typical concerns about property rights, the legal right of ownership or residence (ἔγκτησις) and the permission to build on the site.Footnote ¹² Sarapis, however, appeared to Apollonios in a dream once more and assured him that no one could thwart the god’s plans.Footnote ¹³ The inscription then concludes with the god’s wondrous feat on the day of the trial: ‘There you produced that prodigious wonder among men, along with your wife; for you bound fast the wicked-minded men, who arranged the suit, having made speechless in its jaws the tongue.’Footnote ¹⁴ The inscription continues: ‘By divine power they declared that they were like god-struck images or stones. And indeed all the people on that day were amazed at your aretê, and great glory you harnessed for your servant throughout god-founded Delos.’Footnote ¹⁵ Sarapis intervened, and the accusers’ speech was ‘bound’. They were unable to speak. Sarapis’ miraculous intervention secured a judicial victory for his devotees and, according to the inscription, a strong future for his cult.

In narrating Sarapis’ intervention, Maiïstas strikingly portrays Sarapis as a powerful tongue-binder. The action is familiar from judicial binding spells and curse tablets that targeted the speech of legal adversaries at trial.Footnote ¹⁶ Some curse tablets include performative utterances such as ‘I bind X’, while others call upon gods to ‘bind’ their rivals.Footnote ¹⁷ A variety of curse tablets explicitly name their targets as legal adversaries (antidikoi), advocates (syndikoi) and witnesses (martyres).Footnote ¹⁸ Just as such curse tablets target and ‘bind’ the soul, mind, mouth and speech of individuals and prevent them from responding in the back-and-forth of arbitration, Sarapis ‘binds’ the cognitive and verbal capacities of those suing his priest.

In addition to epigraphic evidence, such feats of judicial binding had been represented and enacted in Greek plays, including in Aeschylus’ dramatization of an orally performative binding spell in the hymnos desmios of the Erinyes.Footnote ¹⁹ A scholion to Aristophanes’ Wasps similarly shows (the fear of) binding spells operative at court (946–8). In the scene, Thucydides, son of Melesias—himself a prominent political figure and skilled orator—is suddenly paralyzed in the jaw, and thus unable to make his case in court. The scholion describes the injury as if Thucydides was targeted by a binding spell—it was as if his tongue had been bound from within (ὥσπερ ἐγκατεχομένην ἔσχε τὴν γλῶτταν).Footnote ²⁰ It is a paralysis and binding such as this that the Delian aretalogy of Sarapis concludes with as a display of Sarapis’ extraordinary aretê.

As is well known, Egyptian ritual texts include themes of silencing and restraining malevolent forces. Priests and ritual practitioners pursued divine assistance, including from Isis, via rituals involving incantation or figural manipulation with the aim of subduing, immobilizing and even verbally silencing adversaries.Footnote ²¹ Read against the background of these Egyptian practices, Delian Sarapis’ display of power can be understood as a display of foreign, specifically Egyptian power. Given Egypt’s prestige as a centre of ancient wisdom, religious authority and ritual sophistication, the understanding of this act as foreign and specifically Egyptian could have supported the spread of the cult on Delos. Nevertheless, emphasizing the Egyptian connections does not preclude a localized interpretation of this event.

The episode also merits consideration in its Delian context as a witness to the dynamic and diverse adaptability of Sarapis—the way Sarapis was fashioned in this specific location—and the social realities of mobility and exchange.Footnote ²² Material remains of ritualized curse practice on Delos suggest that Sarapis’ display of aretê by binding should also be understood within its Cycladic setting. Cursing and binding rituals were practiced on Delos from the fourth century onwards. No fewer than eight bound effigies have been found on the island: four of bronze were discovered in a Hellenistic house, four of lead outside of the retaining wall of the sanctuary of Zeus Hypsistos on Mount Kynthos, and still more are reported to have been found during recent excavations.Footnote ²³

The lead figurines are, in the case of the two males, pierced with iron nails through the eyes, ears and mouth, and in the case of the two females, bound with a collar. The male figurines exhibit a striking connection with the Sarapis aretalogy, inscribed upon a pillar at the sanctuary below the mountain from which these figurines hail: in addition to the nailing of eyes, ears and mouth, their arms are covering their mouth.Footnote ²⁴ The targets’ capacities for speech are forcefully ‘bound’. Some of the bronze figurines, which were bound with their hands behind their backs, also betray significant manipulation of the mouth and tongue: the mouth is wide open, and the tongue is protruding, pressed up against the upper lip as if paralyzed and prevented from speaking.Footnote ²⁵ The targeting of the cursed individual’s cognitive and verbal functioning is reminiscent of the judicial curse tablets and binding spells discussed above—precisely the setting of Sarapis’ binding. Although the lead effigies post-date the Sarapis aretalogy, the ritual technology was much older, with similar lead-cast effigies attested on nearby Cycladic islands as early as the fourth century—evidence of what Lamont refers to as ‘the Cycladic traffic in curses’ and ‘insular networks of ritual binding practice active from at least the early fourth through first centuries BCE’.Footnote ²⁶ When Apollonios I brought Sarapis to Delos, the practice of ritual binding would have been firmly established on the island. This setting casts new light on Maiïstas’ claim that Sarapis’ judicial binding brought the god fame on ‘god-founded Delos’ (90–2).

In addition to bound effigies, curse tablets have been found on Delos. As a centre for transmission and trade, Delos facilitated exchange and mobility among Greeks, Egyptians, Romans and other groups.Footnote ²⁷ It is this role of the island as a commercially active crossroads that helps us account for the fact that one of the oldest Latin curse tablets hails from the island (second century).Footnote ²⁸ Latin curse practice on Delos emerged in a multi-lingual environment and was informed by Greek curse practitioners on the island.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, inscriptions from the early second century show Italians supporting and making dedications at the Delian Sarapieia.Footnote ³⁰ Mobility, cultural exchange and curse practice again converge in a Greek curse tablet from Delos addressed to Dea Syria and the gods who dwell in a certain Συκών.Footnote ³¹ Although later, the opisthographic tablet exhibits a conceptual and verbal connection with Sarapis’ binding in the aretalogy. The curse-writer invokes the deities and calls upon them not only to enact vengeance upon (ἐκδικήσετε) and direct their anger at (διοργιάσετε) wrongdoers—in this case, thieves—but also, in so doing, to generate and display their divine aretê (ἀρετὴν γεννήσετε): ‘Lord gods who inhabit Sykôn, lady goddess Syria who inhabits Sykôn, exact vengeance and generate your aretê and direct your anger against the thief who stole the necklace.’Footnote ³² The Egyptian Sarapis’ culminating and ultimate exhibition of aretê is the enactment of a ritual binding against those who have wronged him, specifically targeting their capacity for speech. In this tablet, the Syrian deities, who were worshipped alongside Sarapis, Isis and the Egyptian gods in the Inopos quarter of Delos,Footnote ³³ are summoned to unveil their aretê in the fulfilment of a curse that targets the thieves’ limbs and body-parts.

Further evidence for the pursuit of divine justice and cursing in the Inopos quarter is provided by a Greek marble stele found in the Sanctuary of the Syrian Gods on Delos inscribed with a prayer made by a certain Theogenes to the Sun and the Syrian goddess (Ἁγνὴ θεά). The inscription concerns a woman who has defrauded Theogenes of a deposit pertaining to manumission. It petitions that she not escape the goddess’s power (μὴ ἐκφύγοι τὸ κράτος τῆς θεᾶς) and asks for the cultic attendants of the goddess to ritually slander οr utter imprecations against her (βλασφημεῖν αὐτήν).Footnote ³⁴ The presence of cursing and ritual pursuits of divine justice in the Inopos quarter, specifically in the sanctuary of the Syrian gods, is especially significant for the task of offering a localized interpretation of Sarapis’ divine binding. This is so not simply because of their geographical proximity but also because there is evidence for an overlapping cultic network between worshippers at the Sarapieia and the sanctuary of Syrian gods. The inscriptional record, specifically dedications and inventory lists, attests to the same individuals or families participating in cultic activities at both.Footnote ³⁵ Sarapis’ divine binding would have been an intimately recognizable act not only on Delos but even more specifically in the context of the Inopos valley, where individuals who frequented both cults and made dedications to both Egyptian and Syrian divinities would have understood a familiar ritual logic.

The foregoing examples of binding, cursing and pursuing divine justice provide a local context of Delian ritual practice for interpreting the famous aretalogy of Sarapis. The presence of bound effigies and Greek and Latin curse tablets reveals a local ritual practice which Egyptian migrants and devotees of Sarapis incorporated into their cult and worship patterns. Yet even while the action of Sarapis corresponds to the actions of those invoked in katadesmoi and ‘prayers for justice’,Footnote ³⁶ the hymnic inscription from Delos is not a curse tablet, binding spell or ‘prayer for justice’. It is rather a hymnic celebration and narrative of Sarapis having bound the opponents and brought about justice in court. The aretalogy is inscribed upon a stone pillar in the sanctuary, while curse tablets and binding spells are inscribed on lead (or, in the case of curse effigies, made of cast-bronze or lead) and typically deposited in graves, wells and sanctuaries, where they were often buried so as not to be read.Footnote ³⁷ Yet despite differences of materials, purpose and rhetorical framing, the inscription upon the pillar in Sarapieion A makes best sense in light of binding curses. The successful outcome of that which is standardly categorized by contemporary scholars as malevolent ‘magic’ (binding) and thereby consigned, even if implicitly, to a shadowy realm of secret, if not illicit dealings in the dark is here published and publicly inscribed as a matter of praise in the sanctuary.

The Delian aretalogy of Sarapis and Delian curse practices are valuable witnesses to the ways in which Delos functioned as a central Aegean hub of cultural exchange and mobility. The trade port facilitated the transmission of cults, whose agents in turn appropriated local ritual technologies and practices. Even while devotees of Sarapis on Delos asserted an ancestral Egyptian pedigree and authority, they presented the Egyptian god’s divine power in a way that resonated locally. In his poetic praise of Sarapis’ aretê, Maiïstas exploited the presence of binding and cursing rituals on the island. Two generations after the priest of Sarapis Apollonios I migrated from Memphis to Delos, the Delian Sarapis cult sought to cultivate a strong local presence and forge an influential role in the island’s community. Among its strategies for asserting itself as a new but powerful cult was incorporating local ritual idioms and practices into their praise of Sarapis, here a potent binder. Sarapis’ tongue-binding is a Graeco-Egyptian act, and indeed one that ought to be interpreted not against an exclusively Egyptian background of divine assistance or a generic Greek background of binding spells and curse tablets but rather an intimate and local context based on evidence for binding and pursuing divine justice on the Cyclades, Delos included. By inscribing Sarapis’ binding feat physically upon a column for those entering the sanctuary to see, devotees of Sarapis inscribed the god and his cult socially into the fabric of Delos and its local networks. Delian Sarapis was a foreign god with a familiar power.