THE GOLD TABLETS

two leaves of inscribed gold, each with its own page: the Greek, the English, and the apparatus

The Gold Tablets, the Orphic leaves.
Edition by the Orphic Church, MMXXVI.
https://orphic.church/library/gold-tablets/
Cite a single leaf by its own page and line, as From Thessaly 2.

About this edition

Two leaves of inscribed gold are gathered here, each on a page of its own: the Greek as it stands, the English beside it, and an apparatus for whoever wants the words taken apart.

The Greek of the leaf from Petelia is Diels's text, with his marks kept: the iota written on the line, his supplements in angle brackets, a letter he resolved in round ones. The leaf from Thessaly is given as its letters were cut, without division between words, without accents, and without supplement.

The plates are photographs, trimmed to the leaf itself so that nothing of the case, the mount or the ground remains. On the leaf from Petelia a museum number painted on the gold has been taken out and the gold closed over it; the ancient letters around it are untouched, and nothing else in either plate is altered.

Acknowledgements

These leaves were carried to us by many hands, most of them unknown: those who buried them, those who found them, those who kept them, and those who first read them.

We thank Hermann Diels, whose text of the leaf from Petelia we follow, and Gilbert Murray, whose English of it we give.

We thank the museums that hold the leaves and made their photographs free, and the Internet Archive, from whose page images the Greek of Diels was transcribed.

• Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. II, 4th ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1922), 66 B 17 and B 20.
• Gilbert Murray, "Critical Appendix on the Orphic Tablets", in Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 660–661.