In our third podcast episode – recorded this time in German – we sat down with Professor Sebastian Richter from the Free University of Berlin, expert on Coptic language and papyrology to discuss, among other topics, the possible relationship between Coptic magical and alchemical texts. What did alchemy mean in the context of Byzantine and Islamic Egypt? What alchemical processes do the manuscripts edited by Professor Richter uncover, and who wrote them? Listen and enjoy! In unserem dritten Podcast – ausnahmsweise in deutscher Sprache aufgenommen – haben wir uns mit Prof. Sebastian Richter von der Freien Universität Berlin zusammengesetzt, um die mögliche Beziehung zwischen koptischen magischen und alchemistischen Texten zu…
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Looking at the Coptic Magical Papyri IX: Magical Archives
In the past posts in this series, we’ve looked at individual manuscripts – how to classify them, where and when they come from, what they were made from, and the forms that they took. But individual manuscripts are only part of the story, so this week we’ll introduce the concept of archives, groups of manuscripts which give us more information than individual manuscripts would on their own. In papyrology an “archive” is a group of documents which were brought together by a historical individual for a specific purpose. Sometimes these are libraries – books which someone might have collected and purchased because they wanted to read them; sometimes they are…