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A. Sartre-Fauriat et M. Sartre, IGLS XIV, La Batanée et le Jawlān oriental, BAH 207 (2016)
No full textZellmann-Rohrer Michael. A. Sartre-Fauriat et M. Sartre, IGLS XIV, La Batanée et le Jawlān oriental, BAH 207 (2016). In: Topoi, volume 21/2, 2017. pp. 665-689
A Syriac-Arabic dream-request and its Jewish tradition
Full text linkThe present article seeks to establish the text and interpretation of a fragment of an early modern Syriac text whose content belongs to the genre of what is conventionally termed magic.1 The fragment has survived in the binding of a later codex. The text, of which an edition with translation and commentary follows this introduction, is a guide for a procedure to summon up a mantic dream. The instructions are in Syriac (both language and script), but the central invocation addresses several supernatural powers in Arabic, here rendered in Syriac script (Garšūnī),2 before concluding in Syriac. As the rest of this introduction will be concerned to show, its makeup is yet more complex, as it participates in a tradition of such recipes for compelling a significant dream attested from the late ancient ritual papyri of Roman Egypt, and well-represented in late ancient and medieval Jewish magical treatises and handbooks
Notes on Magical Papyri: Part I
Full text linkThis article collects new proposals for the reading and understanding of two Greek magical formularies developed in work on the Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies: Text and Translation (GEMF): a narrative incantation motif involving Zeus and, as argued here, a personified part of the human body to be healed by the procedure (“Conduit”) in PGM IV (GEMF 57), and a witness to a complex of invocations of the god Bes in SM II 90 (GEMF 62)
STARS AND SYSTEMS: TWO WORKS ON THE ASTRAL SCIENCES
Full text linkWhat moves the stars, and what do their movements mean for life on earth? As conventionally divided, even if the distinction of cognates was complicated already in antiquity, the answers to these questions belong respectively to astronomy and astrology. Graeco-Roman astrology generally dispensed with explanations of causes – perhaps because systems proposed by the likes of Aristotle, the topic of B. and C., were taken as given – to focus on describing and linking effects to the dispositions of celestial bodies believed to produce them. This review article considers the substantial contributions of L. as well as B. and C., focused on astrology and astronomy respectively, to a growing field of interdisciplinary inquiry – besides Classics, key contributors are Assyriology, Egyptology and History of Science – on the astral sciences. This field takes account of scholarly engagement with the stars, of their alleged effects on earth and of a wider cultural and historical embedding, reflected in religion, literature and art. The three books under review provide richly contextualised studies of individual sources relevant to the astral sciences, from a primarily philological standpoint, which will be instrumental in assessing the place of their ancient authors in the history of knowledge
An Assemblage of Coptic Magical Texts on Leather and Their Traditional Context (P.Brit.Mus. inv. no. EA 10122, 10376, 10391, 10434, 10414)
Full text linkReport on the re-edition of an assemblage of Coptic magical texts on leather manuscripts from Byzantine or early Islamic Egypt, possibly from the Theban region, now in the British Museum. Select new readings and proposals for interpretative context, in the history of pre-modern religion and magic and in the practice of the ancient collector(s) of the manuscripts, are presented
A letter of Q. Aemilius Saturninus, praefectus Aegypti
No full textThe article is the first edition of an edict in the form of a letter from the prefect Q. Aemilius Saturninus (in office circa 197/8–200 ce) to the strategi of the Heptanomia and Arsinoites, copied on the back of a sheet cut from a land register attesting the monartabos-tax, probably from the Oxyrhynchites. The fragmentary edict, apparently in part a cover for a further letter to a beneficiarius, mentions praiseworthy conduct by the latter in connection to a shortfall in the tax grain. A synthesis of the new text with other evidence for Saturninus as prefect is also presented
Hippocratic Diagnosis, Solomonic Therapy, Roman Amulets: Epilepsy, Exorcism, and the Diffusion of a Jewish Tradition in the Roman World
Full text linkTwo contrasting portraits of exorcism in the Roman period for patients with symptoms consistent with epilepsy, drawn by Josephus (A.J. 8.45–47) and Lucian (Philops. §16), illustrate a substantial albeit contested diffusion of that ancient technique from the Jewish tradition to a wider Mediterranean public. The process is reflected in a similarly complex traditional background and textual composition of a group of inscribed Greek amulets for epilepsy. A sidelight on attitudes towards the practice of exorcism, on its way to wider popularity, and the conception of epilepsy is cast by these amulets, which have not yet been studied as a group. Their texts witness the application of precise Greek medical terminology, yet to an end, and in a compositional company, that authors in the Hippocratic tradition would have rejected. More generally, the artifacts offer a cross-section of amuletic practice and its diversity in the Roman and late ancient periods
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