Our project is tied up with the land of Egypt, and not only because the texts we’re studying are written in Coptic. Egypt has a unique place in the study of the ancient Mediterranean because of its proverbial “dry sands”. Most of the population has always lived along the narrow stretch of the Nile valley – extending nearly 1200 km from Aswan in the south to Alexandria in the north, but only 3-20 km wide at any point along its course. On each side of the valley stretches the mountainous desert, filled over the centuries with towns, tombs, temples, churches, and monasteries. While elsewhere ancient texts often rotted away, the…
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Religion in the Magical Papyri VI: Christianity and Magic
In our previous posts we have discussed “pagan” and “gnostic” influences in Coptic language magic, so readers would be forgiven for thinking that all such texts are full of Greek, Egyptian and Sethian deities. The bulk of our manuscripts, however, date to between the fifth and eleventh centuries CE, a period for most of which the majority of Egyptians were, at least nominally, adherents to some form of orthodox Christianity. Christianity was the dominant worldview, and the magical texts therefore reflect this, and seem to adhere to some kind of Christianity, even if they are not always strictly orthodox. But what does this “Christian magic” look like? AMS 9 is…