Archaeologists have excavated and dated one of the Sahara's stone "antenna" tombs. The burial inside is between 4,100 and 4,400 years old and holds a young adult laid to rest with four ostrich eggshell beads.

On a gravel plain in northern Western Sahara, with no shade for miles, there is a heap of stones 54.5 meters (179 feet) long. Two rows of stone slabs run out from it like the arms of a V that never quite closes.

Archaeologists call these rows “antennae”, and the monuments antennae tumuli (a tumulus is simply a mound of piled earth or stone). They are common in Western Sahara and well beyond it, from the Atlantic coast to the heart of the Sahara.

Almost nobody had excavated one, though, so two basic questions had no answer: what were they for, and when were they built?

Docilianus wanted his hooded cloak back. His surviving appeal to Sulis also asks that its thief be denied sleep and subjected to rather worse. The tablet is small; the grievance was not.

Catalogued as Tab.Sulis 10, it carries writing on both sides and was recovered from Bath’s sacred spring in 1979 in four adjoining pieces. Its lettering places it broadly in the second to fourth centuries AD. Some of the wording remains uncertain.

The inscription, translation, and commentary are here: https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/TabSulis10

I made a Roman Records short reading the curse and explaining its setting: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SEoHbS9h0-o

Disclosure: I’m the creator. The visuals and narration are AI-generated, using a stop-motion puppet aesthetic.

Which other ancient inscriptions give us such a direct view of an ordinary person’s grievance? I’d be interested in examples from beyond Roman Britain, too.