The Beatles said it best, noting that sometimes if we hope to get by, we're going to need

a little help from our friends.

And that was the situation an archaeologist found himself in back in the late 1920s.

He had two objects on his desk that were found 100 miles apart, but they were somehow

connected.

One was a golden ring, found by a farmer way back in 1785, in an area of England that

had once been occupied by the Romans.

The other found many years later and many miles away at the site of an old Celtic temple

was a tablet, and yet both of them had the same person's name on them, Sena-Kiannis.

The archaeologist, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, wanted answers to their mysterious connection,

but he needed someone who was better with translating old Latin than he was.

So he called in his friend John, who among other career highlights, had worked on the Oxford

English Dictionary.

And as Wheeler predicted, John was able to shed light on the mystery.

The tablet's message translated as, Sylvieannis has lost a ring, among those who bear the name

of Sena-Kiannis to none grant health until he bring back the ring to the temple.

It turns out the ring had originally belonged to a Roman man named Sylvieannis, but was stolen

by another guy named Sena-Kiannis, and while the thief carved his name onto his precious

prize, the old owner had carved something else, not just a memo, but a curse tablet.

It's an ancient idea, but one that held on for thousands of years, when in need, a

curse could be written down and offered up in just the right way, bending the threads

of fate to their wishes, often for nefarious reasons, like heaping misfortune upon a thief.

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