It’s hard to believe that three years of the project have already passed! As it has been for many others all across the world, 2021 has been a year in which the COVID-19 Pandemic has still had a major effect on our work, but we’re lucky that – while we weren’t able to attend many in-person conferences or visit many papyrus collections – we still managed to have a year of very productive teamwork. The Kyprianos Database When Kyprianos launched online in October last year, it contained only 677 manuscript entries, and 11 Coptic texts. We’re proud to announce that we’ve managed to make it significantly bigger this year –…
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Kyprianos Update (11 October 2021)
We’ve just posted our latest update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. The update includes: 15 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 958. These contain primarily Greek and/or Coptic magical texts from Egypt. 9 new text entries, bringing the total to 165. Among the texts we’ve chosen for this update are… Rossi’s Gnostic Tractate, a long, now-lost magical prayer, and one of the first-published Coptic magical texts, accompanied by an image of an angel shown here on the right. Louvre E 14.250, a highly-illustrated separation curse written on a piece of parchment shaped like a knife. Vienna K 10335, a short and mysterious text containing the magical names…
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Kyprianos Update (10 August 2021)
We’ve just posted our latest update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. The update includes: 22 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 943. These contain primarily Greek and/or Coptic magical texts from Egypt. 47 new text entries, bringing the total to 156. Among the texts we’ve chosen for this update are… The recipes from P. Macq. I 1, one of the most famous Coptic magical papyri. Although we have not yet edited the long prayer to the Baktiotha with which it begins, our edition of its 31 recipes resolves several problems which confronted its initial editors. Two more texts featuring the Egyptian goddess Isis: Hs. Schmidt 1, another…
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Job Opportunity: 23-month Position in the Study of Coptic Magic (doctoral)
The project The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Roman and Early Islamic Egypt at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg is pleased to announce a vacancy within the Department of Egyptology.This will be a 23-month 65% position, paid at the level of TVL E-13, suitable for a scholar with a master’s degree, who may be presently working on a doctoral degree. The position will begin 1 October 2021 and continue until 31 August 2023. The Coptic Magical Papyri project, led by Dr. Korshi Dosoo, has been running since September 2018, and focuses on the study of “magical” texts from Late Antique and early Islamic Egypt written in Coptic. The primary task of…
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Kyprianos Update (1 July 2021)
We’ve just posted our latest update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. As well as correcting some small mistakes in manuscript, text, and archive entries, the biggest change is that the texts entries now contains a field for tracings of the magical images and diagrams (called tableaux) which accompany them. You can see an example on the right, taken from F1908.45.12, a strange papyrus with no legible text, perhaps some kind of amulet. There are 19 tracings in the current update, and we’ll continue to add them to new texts with each forthcoming update. The update includes: 10 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 921. These contain…
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Kyprianos Update (28 May 2021)
We’ve just posted our latest update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. As well as correcting some small mistakes in manuscript, text, and archive entries, the update includes: 22 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 911. These contain primarily Greek and/or Coptic magical texts from Egypt. 6 new text entries, bringing the total to 94. Among the texts we’ve chosen for this update are… the Hymn of Praise of the Archangel Michael, the longest surviving Coptic magical text, a fascinating long prayer for healing and protection from demons attributed to Michael himself. Our new edition is the first since the original German edition of 1966 to be based…
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Kyprianos Update (30 April 2021)
We’ve just posted our latest update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. As well as correcting some small mistakes in manuscript, text, and archive entries, the update includes: 10 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 889. These contain primarily Greek and/or Coptic magical texts from Egypt. 26 new text entries, bringing the total to 88. Among the texts we’ve chosen for this update are… the remaining curses and love spells from Cairo JdE 42573, a paper codex from the 10th or 11th century… three recipes from a fragmentary magico-medical text, for treating a woman suffering from uterine bleeding, a crying child, and swelling; the last recipe seems to…
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Collaboration with Coptic SCRIPTORIUM
We’re very excited to announce a new collaboration with the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM project. As many of you will know, Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is a collaborative project which digitises Coptic texts in a sophisticated way which incorporates several layers, including lemmatisation (identifying individual words), syntactical analysis (analysing the grammar of clauses), and entity tagging (identifying ‘things’, usually nouns and noun groups). This opens up many new ways of interacting with texts, including using ANNIS to perform sophisticated searches, and linking texts to the Coptic Dictionary Online so that word usage can be explored. With the help of the fantastic SCRIPTORIUM team, we’ve fully processed four texts, which have been added to their…
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Kyprianos Update (24 March 2021)
We’ve just posted our second 2021 update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. As well as correcting some small mistakes in manuscript, text, and archive entries, the update includes: 39 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 879. These are primarily Greek and/or Coptic magical texts from Egypt. 23 new text entries, bringing the total to 62. Among the fascinating texts we’ve chosen for this update are… a strange set of curses from a paper codex from the 10th or 11th century never before published in English translation… a copy of the exorcistic prayer attributed to the Virgin Mary known as ‘Mary in Bartos’ (also never before published in…
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Kyprianos Update (1 March 2021)
We’ve just posted our first 2021 update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. As well as correcting some small mistakes in manuscript, text, and archive entries, the update includes: 45 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 840. These are primarily Greek and/or Coptic magical texts from Egypt and Nubia. 12 new text entries, bringing the total to 39. These include… …an amulet held in Moscow made up of Gospel citations. …another love spell containing a Horus-Isis charm, written across three ostraca. 1 new archive – a group of Christian amulets from Oxyrhynchus written by a single scribe – bringing the total to 14.