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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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…
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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…
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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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Podcast #6: A Focus on Coptic with Edward Love
In this episode of The Coptic Magical Papyri Podcast, Edward O.D. Love offers a deeper look into how Coptic relates to Demotic, into the development of Old Coptic, Coptic. Please, listen to the previous episode with Edward, to get a full idea of development of Egyptian language. Edward Love also introduces us to his habilitation, which focuses on the letters to gods. Edward Love is post-doctoral assistant on the project The Coptic Magical Papyri at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg. Edward’s principal research interests include the conceptualisation, mechanics, and contexts of interaction with the divine in Egypt. A parallel research interest, stemming from the work of his doctoral thesis, is…
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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…