In this podcast episode, our guest Joseph E. Sanzo discusses the intersection between Christian and Jewish magic. Joseph Sanzo is Associate Professor of the History of Religions at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Joseph Sanzo obtained his PhD degree at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2012 and his thesis was published in 2014 in a volume called Scriptural Incipits on Amulets from Late Antique Egypt: Text, Typology, and Theory. Since then, he has held various positions; after his PhD, he was a lecturer at UCLA and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Jerusalem, between 2015 and 2018 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of…
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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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Podcast #10: Greek and Egyptian deities in Coptic magical texts with Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin
In this podcast episode, we are discussing Greek and Egyptian deities appearing in Coptic magical texts, which are predominantly Christian. How is it possible that one encounters Artemis and Jesus in the very same text (BNF Suppl. Grec. 1340)? And Isis and Horus in many others at the time when Christianity was predominant in Egypt? Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin, our guest for this podcast episode, helps us to understand how such mixing of various traditions was possible and what shape this tendency took. Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin defended a thesis on this topic, appearing later this year as part of the Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta series (Peeters). Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin has obtained a…
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Coptic Magical Papyri on the Road: Letters, Archives and Communication in Late Antiquity Heidelberg Conference
Rodney Ast and Loreleï Vanderheyden of the sub-project of SFB 933, A02 “Antique Letters as a Means of Communication,” organized a hybrid conference in Heidelberg on the 8th and 9th of November 2021 focused on letters, archives, and communication in Late Antiquity. As Rodney Ast remarked in his introduction to the conference, there has been an increasing focus in recent years on the appreciation of texts as physical products of communities organized around the cultures of writing. Materiality and text culture was thus the main focus of this conference on letters. Jean-Luc Fournet was the keynote speaker at the conference; he spoke about the private letters of Graeco-Roman Egypt, emphasizing…
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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…
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2021 Review: The Third Year of the Coptic Magical Papyri Project
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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Podcast #9: Coptic Pharmacological Texts with Anne Grons
In this episode of the podcast, we are discussing Coptic pharmacological texts with Anne Grons, who is currently finishing her thesis on the topic. Pharmacological texts offer a window into ancient medical practices. The pharmacological prescriptions are aimed at healing various issues, often by applying remedies made of plants, animals, minerals or other substances, to the body. Coptic pharmacological texts are crucial for understanding Coptic magical prescriptions – often, the boundaries between the two genres are blurred, as they tend to use the same formulations or ingredients. Anne Grons has studied Egyptology and was the assistant/lexicographer at the project Dictionary and Database of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC) (Freie Universität…
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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…