A 2,300-year-old ceramic jar filled with the bones of a dismembered chicken was likely part of an ancient curse to paralyze and kill 55 people in ancient Athens, archaeologists say. The finding reveals new evidence for how people tried to use "magic" in the city.

They discovered the jar, along with a coin, beneath the floor of the Agora's Classical Commercial Building, which was used by ancient craftspeople.

"The pot contained the dismembered head and lower limbs of a young chicken," Jessica Lamont, a classics professor at Yale University, wrote in an article published in the journal Hesperia.

At the time, around 300 BC, the people who made the curse also gouged a large iron nail through the vessel.