1 - Who are you?

Summary

I am parched with thirst and I perish.

But give me to drink from the ever-flowing spring on the right, by the cypress.

“Who are you? Where are you from?”

I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven.

(gold tablet B4 from Crete = OF 479 Bernabé 2004–07)

“Who are you?” ask the unnamed guardians, as the deceased begs for the water of Memory. “Where are you from?” From the discovery of the first gold lamellae in the nineteenth century to the most recent discoveries, scholars have asked much the same questions about the tablets themselves: Who are the people who chose to have these enigmatic scraps of gold foil buried with them in their graves? Where do these texts come from? How can we reconstruct the religious context of these mysterious texts?

Recent discoveries have prompted scholars to examine from new theoretical perspectives both the contexts in which the tablets were produced and the structures of the texts themselves. This collection brings together in English a number of previously published and new studies of the “Orphic” Gold tablets, with the goal of making accessible to a wider audience some of the new methodologies being applied to the study of the tablets. In addition, a survey of the trends in the scholarship and a compilation of the recent bibliography not only provides an introduction to the serious study of the tablets, but also illuminates the place of these tablets within the scholarship of ancient Greek religion.