Uehlinger, C., Galoppin, T., & Lebreton, S. (Eds.)
In
line with the previous issues of the series “Divine Names on the Spot”
devoted to the study of divine names in Greek and Semitic contexts, this
third volume focuses on the question “Who named the gods?” Naming the
divine, within the ritual communication or in narratives and discourses
about gods and goddesses, involves choices, negotiations or strategies
by human agents, in accordance with traditions or in order to activate
innovations. Always context-sensitive, the agency of human addressers,
narrators, or beneficiaries of the divine powers must be put forward as a
main factor of these processes. From the addresses to the gods by kings
in Cyprus to the carriage drivers naming Poseidon Helikapanaios in
Thessaly, through the carving of divine names on a cup found in
Jerusalem, the dozen of contributions gathered here make steps for a
long exploration of divine names in the making, and suggest a few
directions and orientations for investigating human agency in religious
history.
Ausgehend von den Forschungen auf dem Çukuriçi Höyük, einer
prähistorischen Tellsiedlung an der westanatolischen Ägäisküste, widmet
sich der vorliegende Band der Analyse der
Textilverarbeitungstechnologie. Aufgrund der chronologischen Tiefe, der
geografischen Lage und der unter Einbeziehung modernster Methoden
durchgeführten Ausgrabungen, stellt diese Fundstelle die ideale Basis
für die diachrone Untersuchung prähistorischer Textiltechnologien in
Anatolien und der Ägäis sowie in benachbarten Gebieten dar.
Chronologisch setzen die Studien bei den Anfängen der Besiedlung des
Çukuriçi Höyük im 7. Jahrtausend v. Chr. an und gehen leicht über die
finale Phase der Siedlung hinaus bis an das Ende des 3. Jahrtausends
v. Chr. Dabei dient das oft unbeachtete Alltagshandwerk als
Ausgangspunkt, um die Verbreitung von Technologien und die damit
verbundenen sozialen Systeme zu analysieren. Um die komplexen
Zusammenhänge beleuchten zu können, wurden Textilgeräte (Spinnwirtel und
Webgewichte) aus verschiedenen Fundorten Griechenlands, Bulgariens und
der Westtürkei aufgenommen und mittels analytisch-statistischer
Verfahren ausgewertet. Die Ergebnisse dieser Untersuchungen wurden
mittels unterschiedlicher sozio-ökologischer Modelle interpretiert. Die
Studien geben Aufschluss darüber, wie weitläufiger technologischer
Transfer erfolgte und welche sozialen Faktoren damit einhergingen.
Aufgrund der strukturierten Vorgehensweise mittels statistischer
Methoden und Modell-Interpretationen bietet die Studie eine fundierte
Grundlage, auf der zukünftige Untersuchungen aufbauen können. So
eröffnet die textile Archäologie neue Perspektiven auf die kulturelle
Dynamik und den Innovationsaustausch im prähistorischen Anatolien.
Two pages from P. Mich. Inv. 593 (KYP M9),
an early Coptic magical codex containing a prayer for power and favour
attributed to Seth, the son of Adam and Eve, one of the manuscripts the
team is editing for Papyri Copticae Magicae volume 2.
The Coptic Magical Formularies project finished its first full year
in 2025, with some big changes. Former principal investigator Korshi
Dosoo started a new position at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique (CNRS) in France, but he will continue to work with the Coptic Magical Formularies project
as an external collaborator. Markéta Preininger will stay on as
principal investigator, and the team has grown bigger, as
Sophie-Charlotte Gissat has joined as a research assistant. Roxanne
Bélanger Sarrazin, currently a fellow on our partner project MagEIA has also joined as a collaborator, and will continue to work as a full member of the team after her fellowship.
With all of these changes, it’s been a while since our last database
update, but we have a big one in the works, with editions of most of the
main texts of two of the big surviving archives of Coptic magical
papyri, the British Museum Portfolio, and Michigan Wizard’s Hoard,
nearly ready. As often happens when we revisit texts first published
nearly a hundred years ago, these editions will substantially update and
correct the older interpretations; we have even managed to find and
decipher an encoded text previously misunderstood as meaningless magical
words! We are also working on updating the editions of papyri which are
already online so that they incorporate the corrections and fuller
notes found in the published Papyri Copticae Magicae volume 1. All of this will be available in Kyprianos in early 2026.
Our project is also part of a larger network of international
projects exploring ancient magic and the Coptic language, and over the
last year these have been very active. In addition to working with our
sister project MagEIA in Würzburg, we are collaborating with the Coptic Scriptorium
to lemmatise Coptic magical texts, allowing them to be searched and
analysed for linguistic information. We are also working with the new Phoinix
project, which is digitising magical gems, to allow them to be searched
on both platforms. We are collaborating with our colleague Panagiota Sarischouli
(Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) on her newly-funded NOMINA
project, which will create an online database of voces magical (“magical
words”), first in Greek texts, but later including other languages,
including Coptic. Finally, we have been working with the Chicago-based Transmission of Magical Knowledge project on the publication of the second volume of the Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies (GEMF), looking in particular at the ‘Old Coptic’
texts, some of the earliest surviving Coptic manuscripts, and evidence
for a syncretistic magical practice combining Greek, Egyptian, and
Christian influences.
In the last year, team members submitted a good many articles (and
even a book or two…), but only four appeared in print and/or online:
Bélanger Sarrazin, Roxanne. “Prayer of Mary at Bartos.” e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha. https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/prayer-of-mary-at-bartos/ (open access) The
‘Prayer of Mary at Bartos’ is one of the most important healing prayers
in the tradition of the Alexandrian Church, preserved in many copies in
Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, and a single Greek copy. This entry for the
online reference work e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha of NASSCAL
(North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal
Literature) provides an overview of the prayer in its two major
traditions, and gives a comprehensive published and online bibliography
for the text and its manuscripts.
Dosoo, Korshi. “Magical Names: Tracing Religious Changes in Egyptian Magical Texts from Roman and Early Islamic Egypt”, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 26.1 (2024): 69–144. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/arege-2024-0005/html (open access) Magical
texts from Egypt, written in both Greek and Coptic, provide us with a
view of religious practices in Egypt quite different from that found
either in canonical or documentary texts. This article explores two ways
in which the names they contain might help us to map the cultural
transformations of the fourth- through twelfth centuries. The first is
by looking at the names of gods, angels and other superhuman beings,
tracking the decline of the ‘pagan’ Graeco-Egyptian deities, and the
rise of the Christian pantheon, leaving with a few interesting holdouts.
The second is by looking at the names of the individuals mentioned in
magical texts – the clients for whom amulets were created, and the
victims targeted by love spells and curses. Do the onomastic changes in
magical texts follow the general trends of naming practices over this
period, or attest to a magical subculture with its own naming habits?
And do the religious contents of the magical texts correspond with the
implied confessional belongings of the people for whom they were
created? Did Christians use Christian magic, or do we find more complex
patterns – Christians using ‘pagan’ magic, or Muslims using Christian
magic, for example?
Preininger, Markéta. “Taxonomies of Illnesses and the Dynamics of Cursing and Healing the Body in Christian Egypt”, Trends in Classics 17.1 (2025): 162–183. https://doi.org/10.1515/tc-2025-0008 (open access) The
Coptic magical corpus, a collection of manuscripts produced in Egypt
between the fourth and twelfth centuries CE for private ritual purposes,
provides a rich source concerning non-institutional and private healing
practices. Because the magical healing manuscripts from the corpus are
not self-reflexive, unlike Hippocratic writings, the work of
interpretation and reconstruction of the taxonomies of the healing
practices is left to modern researchers. The researcher has several etic
interrelated categories to understand and interpret: symptoms (i.e.,
tooth pain), causes (i.e., evil spirits), and treatments (i.e., binding
of an amulet to the forearm). In understanding the relationships between
these three categories, the modern reader might more easily comprehend
the logic of healing practices witnessed by the corpus. However, not
only healing texts provide an insight into the causes of diseases, but
also curses causing them (called here health curses). In this article, I
both of these corpora are discussed and compared, focusing especially
on lists of illnesses and agents causing them, as they appear in both
healing texts and health curses.
Dosoo, Korshi. “Gatherings of Words: Notes on Books of Magic from Roman Egypt”, West 86th 32.1 (2025) 31-38. https://doi.org/10.1086/737596 Unlike
modern depictions of magical books as inherently powerful objects,
handbooks from Roman Egypt are practical guides that can be fruitfully
explored by attention to their physical details. This study begins by
contrasting this material dimension with iconic-sacred, semantic, and
expressive-performative perspectives on manuscripts before exploring the
production and circulation of handbooks, starting from their basic
unit, the magical recipe, and discussing how these were built up into
larger collections.
As always, if you would like to read an article produced by a team member, but don’t have access to it, please feel free to contact us to receive an offprint.
In addition to our writing, the team members also took part in many
conferences and workshops, among them the second symposium organised by
our colleagues in the MagEIA project, which brought together specialists
on ancient and mediaeval Eurasian and African magic from around the
world. We also took some time out to promote the first volume of Papyri Copticae Magicae, with New Books in Late Antiquity
host Lydia Bremer-McCollum kindly inviting us to an interview to
discuss the writing and contents of the volume. Volume two is well under
way, and we hope to soon be able to share more concrete news about our
plans. In the meantime, thanks to everyone who has reached out to us,
read our work, and supported us over the last year!
This volume is the first of the proceedings of the Twelfth International
Congress of Coptic Studies, organised by the IACS and held at the
Université libre de Bruxelles from 11 to 16 July 2022. It compiles the
reports presented during the plenary sessions of the event. The articles
provide a critical and bibliographic overview of recent research across
various sub-disciplines, (monasticism, liturgy, codicology and
palaeography, art history, contemporary Coptic studies, linguistics,
Nubian studies, archaeology, papyrology, Copto-Arabic studies, and
magic). Together, they reflect the richness and diversity of Coptic
studies at the dawn of the third millennium. This collection synthesises
the most significant advancements – particularly in technical and
methodological approaches – and sheds light on emerging perspectives
within the fields covered. As a testament to the vitality of these
disciplines, this volume will be an invaluable resource for anyone with
an interest in Coptic studies.
Publisher:
Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes
Place of publication:
Aubervilliers ; Paris ; Orléans
This book is the
result of an international symposium held in 2021 at the Faculty of Arts
of Sorbonne University, on the tenth anniversary of the death of
Professor Jacqueline Dangel. It brought together specialists in Greek
and Latin literature to discuss the representations of the reader in
ancient poetry.
The various articles collected here focus on the
presence of the reader and his relationship with the author, as well as
their impact on the text itself, questioning the relevance to ancient
corpora of certain concepts defined by Umberto Eco and the Constance
school. They explore the multiple faces of the “empirical reader”, the
inscription in the poem of the confrontation between this empirical
reader and the “model reader”, the dialectic that governs the
relationship between the poet and the reader when the latter is involved
by the former in the creative process, the particular position of the
reader in performances (theatre, recitations) which, for the Ancients,
constitute forms of reading, and the status of the female reader, who
may be represented by a male or female author. These questions challenge
theories of reception of works borrowed from various chronocultural
eras, from archaic and classical Greece to late Latin culture, including
classical and imperial Latin culture, and a glimpse into neo-Latin
culture.
Das antike Rom war nie eine
Demokratie, und die römische Gesellschaft unterschied sich in ihren
Werten von der heutigen fundamental. Doch lassen sich die Ziele von
Demokratie- und Werteerziehung dennoch im Lateinunterricht erreichen.
Der Band versammelt dazu fünf Beiträge ausgewiesener Expertinnen und
Experten des Fachs an der Schnittstelle zwischen Fachwissenschaft und
Fachdidaktik. Er zeigt beispielhaft auf, welche Texte und Konzepte
geeignet sind, um dieses Ziel zu erreichen. Die vorgestellten Beispiele
betreffen die klassische Geschichtsschreibung (Livius), die
kaiserzeitliche Briefliteratur (Plinius d. J.), schließlich utopische
Literatur der frühen Neuzeit. Zudem wird ein Überblick über den Bereich
der politischen Bildung im Lateinunterricht gegeben.
The AWOL Index: The bibliographic data presented herein has been programmatically extracted from the content of AWOL - The Ancient World Online (ISSN 2156-2253) and formatted in accordance with a structured data model.
AWOL is a project of Charles E. Jones, Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at the Pattee Library, Penn State University
AWOL began with a series of entries under the heading AWOL on the Ancient World Bloggers Group Blog. I moved it to its own space here beginning in 2009.
The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.
The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.
AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.
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