• News

    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…

  • Database updates

    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…

  • Podcast

    Podcast #8: Praise of the Archangel Michael – A Case Study

    This episode was created to celebrate the new edition of the “Praise of the Archangel Michael” (P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 686), produced by the Coptic Magical Project, a prayer written on a parchment codex in Coptic and dated to the 10th century CE. The text is unique, as it is one of the longest magical texts, and it provides many details on the cosmology of Egyptian Christians of that era who were using and producing the magical text. In the first part of the podcast, the text is presented and this is followed by an interview with Korshi Dosoo who clarifies various aspects of the prayer (5:02). Next, you’ll hear the…

  • Database updates

    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…

  • The Kyprianos Database

    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…

  • News

    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…

  • The Kyprianos Database

    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…

  • The Kyprianos Database

    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.

  • Podcast

    Podcast #7: Ancient Christian Liturgy and Magic with Ágnes Mihalykó

    Ágnes Mihálykó is a specialist on Christian liturgical papyri. She has recently published a book on the topic, The Christian Liturgical Papyri: An Introduction, with Mohr Siebeck, in which she offered an extensive introduction into the topic, and she discussed the earliest liturgical manuscripts preserved. In the podcast, we discuss the relationship between liturgical papyri and magical texts. Ágnes spent her undergraduate years studying mostly in Hungary, and obtained her PhD in classics at the University of Oslo in 2017. Currently, Ágnes is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University in Oslo, and she is working on a project in collaboration…

  • News

    Coptic Magical Papyri on the (Virtual) Road: Between Magic and Liturgy: A Workshop on Christian Ritual Texts (26th–28th November 2020)

    At the end of November, the Coptic Magical Papyri project’s team participated at a Zoom workshop organised by Ágnes T. Mihálykó and the Vienna Euchologia Project, which is currently preparing a database of Byzantine euchologia prayer books. The workshop brought together scholars studying Christian liturgical texts and magical texts and objects, and the so-called paraliturgical texts, which are private prayers, such as the euchologia prayer books. There is an overlap between these categories, which has rarely been studied; some “occasional prayers” in the euchologia prayer books can help with health concerns, such as migraines and childbirth, just like magical healing texts (as well as medical ones, of course). Furthermore, magical…