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.
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Kyprianos Update (22 December 2020)
We’ve just posted our third and last update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects for 2020. As well as correcting some small mistakes in manuscript and text entries, the update includes: 47 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 795. The database now includes all entries for the Greek magical texts from Supplementum Magicum (SM), published by Robert Daniel and Franco Maltomini. The manuscripts table now also contains links to the database To Zodion, directed by Raquel Martín Hernández, and containing copies and descriptions of drawings from magical texts. 5 new edited texts, bringing the total to 27. These include: …the three texts of P. Mil.…
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Kyprianos Update (1 December 2020)
Our latest update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects has just gone live. As well as correcting some minor errors in manuscript and text entries, we have added: A whole new Archives table. This table provides information on collections of manuscripts. At present, the online version of Kyprianos contains 10 entries, and we will continue to add more with future updates Among the first archive entries to be put online are the famous Theban Magical Libary (A1), the important archive of texts found in area A House 3 in Kellis (A6), and the Berlin Library (A14), containing over twenty Coptic magical manuscripts with everything from lists of saints…
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Fix for issues with database display (17/11/2020)
We are aiming to update the content of the database every month, but small technical improvements are happening even more frequently. One of the most recent changes may cause the database to display wrongly on devices that have viewed it before. To make loading pages quicker, the browser normally keeps some information about visited websites saved on your computer and only downloads the data that is most likely to have changed from your last visit. This can sometimes cause information to not display correctly when changes are made. Fortunately the fix is very simple – if the database is displaying incorrectly in your browser, just press ctrl + f5 (on a PC)…
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Kyprianos Update (30 October 2020)
Our first update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects has just gone live. As well as correcting some minor errors in manuscript and text entries, we have added: 47 new manuscript entries, bringing the total number to 724. The database now includes entries for all of the manuscripts of the PGM (Papyri Graecae Magicae), the Greek Magical Papyri. 6 new texts, bringing the total to 17. Among the most interesting new additions are: Nahman Bone A (T576), a curse calling upon the Powers of Death written on the bone of a camel or cow. For more on the group of manuscripts to which this belongs, you…
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Kyprianos Digital Database Presentation: 5 November 2020
Now that the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects has been online for nearly a month, the team would like to hold a short online session via Zoom in order to help demonstrate how it works, and discuss our plans for its development. The session is open to the general public, and held on Thursday 5 November at 4pm Würzburg time (GMT + 1) – this is equivalent to 8am Los Angeles time, 11am New York time, 3pm London time, 5pm Cairo time, 12 midnight Tokyo time, and 2am Sydney time. The session will be held digitally via Zoom. If you’d like to attend, please register here. The…