Our historical obsession with hating other people, at least here in Western Civ, can be fascinating. Archaeology has a very short article on a recent find illustrating the practice:
A thin lead curse tablet dating to the fifth century A.D. that was folded and nailed shut to intensify its power has recently been opened, some 80 years after it was discovered beneath the hippodrome in Antioch, in modern-day Turkey. Curse tablets from the period are generally in Greek or Latin, but this one, although difficult to make out with the naked eye, turns out to have been written in a Jewish dialect of Aramaic using Hebrew lettering. “This means it was written by a Jewish scribe,” says Rivka Elitzur-Leiman of Tel Aviv University, “if not a Jewish magician.”
I’ll omit the pic, since they are using it with permission from the researchers, but you can see it at the above link. It makes our era a little less unusually cut-throat, doesn’t it? It turns out the message had something to do with a chariot race, so venality seems to be a universal constant.
