We recently became aware of an error in the latest update which meant that the dates of manuscripts were not displaying properly. The latest update fixes this, and adds minor corrections made in the last month.
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Kyprianos Update (2 February 2024)
After a big year preparing the first volume of the Papyri Copticae Magicae (PCM), we’ve finally had time to post a new update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. As well as the usual corrections and updates, the contents of this update include: For anyone who would like to access the raw data, remember that the Manuscripts and Texts tables may be downloaded from the Database Help page (“About the Kyprianos Database”) in the form of CSV files.
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2023 Review: The End of the Coptic Magical Papyri Project and the Beginning of the Papyri Copticae Magicae
It’s hard to believe that a little over five years have now passed since the three original members of the Coptic Magical Papyri project sat in the Egyptology department in Würzburg and began to plan how we could contribute to the study of Coptic magical texts. In August of this year our project ended, and so in this blog post we will discuss what we achieved in the last five years, beginning with our exciting news, the publication of the first in a new series of Coptic magical texts, Papyri Copticae Magicae. Papyri Copticae Magicae. Coptic Magical Texts, Volume 1: Formularies From the beginning of our project we planned to…
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Materiality and Liminality in Incantation Bowls
A guest post by Anne Sieberichs Introduction The Aramaic Incantation bowls, produced between the fifth and the eighth centuries CE, prove to be an interesting case study, demonstrating the importance of both the visual characteristics of ancient sources and their written content. In art history, archeology, and/or history, one tends to focus on either materiality or textual content. When considering a written object, one cannot understand its true nature if one ignores its materiality and use. As beautifully stated by Daniel Miller (2009: preface), “things make us as much as we make things”. Consequently, objects can have a social life on their own and influence the human subject (Ireland &…
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2022 Review: The Fourth Year of the Coptic Magical Papyri Project
Four years of the Coptic Magical Papyri project have passed, and just a little bit less than one remains. We’ve managed to achieve a lot, but we still have much more to do, and we hope to have some pleasant surprises for our followers in the next few months. The team once again underwent some changes this year – we said goodbye to Matouš Preininger, who since 2020 has been providing us with invaluable IT support. But we were able to welcome back Stella Türker, who has returned to continue helping us by compiling data on manuscripts in the database, and had a new member join the team – Selina…
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Kyprianos Update (12 December 2022)
We’ve just posted our latest update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. There are two major changes with this update. The first is that we have decided to make available the raw data behind Kyprianos in the form of CSV files, in order to allow other users to explore the data more readily. The files for the Manuscripts and Texts tables may be downloaded from the Database Help page (“About the Kyprianos Database”). These files can be opened with most text editing and spreadsheet or database programs, and will allow the database to be reconstructed, searched, and statistics generated, without the need to use the online version.…
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Kyprianos Update (10 July 2022)
We’ve just posted our latest update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. The update includes: 36 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 1059. These contain new Greek, Coptic, Demotic, and Aramaic manuscripts from Egypt and elsewhere dating to the first millennium CE. We are particularly grateful to Anne Sieberichs, who is currently responsible for entering manuscripts from a checklist of Aramaic incantation bowls prepared by Ortal-Paz Saar. We have also made several important corrections to previously uploaded entries. 28 new text entries, bringing the total to 206. These include: Two texts from P. Heid. Inv. Copt. 685 (M186), including the longest Coptic version of the famous Prayer of Mary…
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Kyprianos Update (16 February 2022)
We’ve just posted our first update of the year to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. The update includes: 12 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 1023. These contain Greek and/or Coptic magical and liturgical texts from Egypt and other parts of the Roman Empire, including four new Coptic copies of the Jesus-Abgar correspondence (information kindly provided by Roxanne Bélanger-Sarrazin), and seven new Greek texts edited by Michael Zellmann-Rohrer, six of which are from the new volume of the Oxyrhynchus papyri. 9 new text entries, bringing the total to 178. Two texts from the codex P. Heid. Inv. 685, an exorcism of a female demon and a pair of…
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Kyprianos Update (22 December 2021)
We’ve just posted our latest update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. The update includes: 24 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 1012. These contain Greek and/or Coptic magical and liturgical texts from Egypt and other parts of the Roman Empire, as well as Aramaic incantation bowls from the Prosopographic Database of Magical Bowls produced by Ortal-Paz Saar. 2 new text entries, bringing the total to 169. The two texts we chose for this update are P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 685 p. 10 ll. 1-18, the instructions for creating an amulet empowered by Nassklnē, a being who protected King Solomon. P. Palau Rib. Inv. 412R, an amulet for protecting…
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Kyprianos Update (12 November 2021)
We’ve just posted our latest update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. The update includes: 30 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 988. These contain primarily Greek and/or Coptic magical texts from Egypt and other parts of the Roman Empire, but we are also now beginning to include two new categories of manuscript, arising from our collaborations with two outstanding researchers. The first of these are Aramaic incantation bowls, drawn from the Prosopographic Database of Magical Bowls produced by Ortal-Paz Saar as part of the project “Aramaic Magical Texts from Late Antiquity” (2009-2014) conducted by Dan Levene (University of Southampton) and Gideon Bohak (Tel Aviv University) and…