- Ancient Egyptian Religion, Ancient Egyptian Magical Texts, Ancient Egyptian Magic, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Ancient Egyptian language, Magic and Divination in the Ancient World, and 8 morePapyrology, Coptic language, Coptic Studies, Greek Magical Papyri, Graeco-Roman Egypt, Roman Egypt, Egyptology, and Egyptian Ritual Textsedit
This book is an investigation into the sphere of production and use of two related bilingual magical handbooks found as part of a larger collection of magical and alchemical manuscripts around 1828 in the hills surrounding Luxor, Egypt.... more
This book is an investigation into the sphere of production and use of two related bilingual magical handbooks found as part of a larger collection of magical and alchemical manuscripts around 1828 in the hills surrounding Luxor, Egypt. Both handbooks, dating to the Roman period, contain an assortment of recipes for magical rites in the Demotic and Greek language. The library which comprises these two handbooks is nowadays better known as the Theban Magical Library. The book traces the social and cultural milieu of the composers, compilers and users of the extant spells through a combination of philology, sociolinguistics and cultural analysis. To anybody working on Greco-Roman Egypt, ancient magic, and bilingualism this study is of significant importance.
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This book offers a survey of ancient Egyptian religion - in Dutch.
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This collection of 15 essays throws light on the large and oft-neglected corpus of Osiris liturgies. These texts preserve the incantations and instructions for rituals performed in the temple cult of Osiris, the Egyptian god of death and... more
This collection of 15 essays throws light on the large and oft-neglected corpus of Osiris liturgies. These texts preserve the incantations and instructions for rituals performed in the temple cult of Osiris, the Egyptian god of death and regeneration. Although composed for use in state-sponsored temples, most copies have been found in private burials of the Late and Greco-Roman periods, inscribed on the walls of tombs and sarcophagi or on papyrus scrolls. The preserved copies offer thus not only precious information about the cult of Osiris, but also about transformations in equipping the dead with funerary texts in these later periods of pharaonic history. The essays of this volume, in English, German, and French, explore this interface of temple and tomb. They offer reflections on methodology, showcase new approaches, and examine the scribal culture that produced these documents. Well-known compositions such as the Sakhu or Glorification Rituals, the Embalming Ritual, and the Mouth Opening Ritual are discussed as well as new inscriptions and papyri that remain unedited to this day. Together these essays add to our understanding of the production and use of funerary texts, old and new, in late Pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt.
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This chapter offers an overview of the magical papyri from Roman Egypt, preserved in both Greek and Demotic.
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This chapter discusses the nature of Egyptian ritual, how it was perceived, and who performed it.
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Edition of a textual amulet held in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (MMA 26.3.225). Found in Theban Tomb 313 as a folded and tied packet, the papyrus sheet is inscribed with an apotropaic incantation and drawing. The... more
Edition of a textual amulet held in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (MMA 26.3.225). Found in Theban Tomb 313 as a folded and tied packet, the papyrus sheet is inscribed with an apotropaic incantation and drawing. The incantation invokes “The Entities of Khemenu,” that is, the eight members of the Ogdoad, and orders them to offer protection to the owner of the amulet. The drawing is only partly preserved, but depicted originally two symmetrically arranged crocodiles attacking a figure positioned between them.
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Egyptology has a long history of excavating, collecting, classifying, and studying ancient artefacts from Egypt. This scholarly endeavour of almost 200 years has resulted in an impressive accumulation of information of many different... more
Egyptology has a long history of excavating, collecting, classifying, and studying ancient artefacts from Egypt. This scholarly endeavour of almost 200 years has resulted in an impressive accumulation of information of many different types. Much of this information is still relevant to scholars of today, and publications of the early 20th century or older are still used and quoted. The situation is quite different in the sciences. To scientists, articles written a decade earlier are often completely outdated, and it puzzles them that Egyptologists still make grateful use of books that were writ-ten in the 19th century. That is, however, the burden of being an Egyptologist: one has to survey a publication record of more than a century in order to be up-to-date on a given topic.
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The article discusses the textual structure of the so-called Artemis Liturgical Papyrus, a manuscript of the late Ptolemaic or early Roman period inscribed with the script of a burial ritual for a woman named Artemis, daughter of Herais.... more
The article discusses the textual structure of the so-called Artemis Liturgical Papyrus, a manuscript of the late Ptolemaic or early Roman period inscribed with the script of a burial ritual for a woman named Artemis, daughter of Herais. The manuscript offers several unique features. First, the incantations are written in Classical Egyptian and the hieratic script, whereas the instructions to the incantations (paratextual notations) are in the Demotic language and script. Second, although in essence a liturgical manuscript, the Demotic paratextual notations frame it as a procedure text. Third, the incantations are all excerpts from liturgical texts known from various other manuscripts. To account for the manuscript’s makeshift character, the concept of ‘scribal bricolage’ is introduced.
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This article traces the long history of textual amulets in ancient Egypt. Their origin and subsequent developments are reconstructed through a study of the materials used for their production and a close reading of the instructions... more
This article traces the long history of textual amulets in ancient Egypt. Their origin and subsequent developments are reconstructed through a study of the materials used for their production and a close reading of the instructions contained in formularies for fashioning such amulets. A typology for textual amulets made of papyrus, which is based on physical and formal characteristics of the preserved artifacts, is presented.
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This article offers an edition of two papyrus copies of a type of Demotic funerary texts best known as ‘Demotic documents for breathing’. Although small in size and offering merely two more versions of a formulaic funerary text, the two... more
This article offers an edition of two papyrus copies of a type of Demotic funerary texts best known as ‘Demotic documents for breathing’. Although small in size and offering merely two more versions of a formulaic funerary text, the two papyri deserve our closest attention. There are good reasons to assume that they are the product of the very same scribe. Thanks to their good state of preservation, they offer thus the opportunity to study in some detail how a scribe in Roman Thebes went about preparing such documents.
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This article offers the edition of two columns of a so-called diagonal star table that are inscribed on a wooden batten (LACMA M80.202.500) that was once affixed to the underside of the lid of a Middle Kingdom coffin. The two columns... more
This article offers the edition of two columns of a so-called diagonal star table that are inscribed on a wooden batten (LACMA M80.202.500) that was once affixed to the underside of the lid of a Middle Kingdom coffin. The two columns follow the Kenmet table format, bringing the number of known artifacts preserving Kenmet tables up to eleven. The item is without provenance, but, like the other Kenmet tables, is likely from the site of Assiut and dates to the early Middle Kingdom.
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This article offers a preliminary survey of an unpublished manuscript, dating to the late Ptolemaic or early Roman period, that preserves a unique collection of liturgical texts for Osirian rituals adapted and inscribed for the burial of... more
This article offers a preliminary survey of an unpublished manuscript, dating to the late Ptolemaic or early Roman period, that preserves a unique collection of liturgical texts for Osirian rituals adapted and inscribed for the burial of a woman named Artemis, born of Herais. I term the manuscript ‘the Artemis Liturgical Papyrus’ after its owner. Apart from the liturgical texts themselves, the manuscript is of particular interest for its inclusion of rubrics in Demotic serving as instructions for use of the incantations, which are otherwise all written in hieratic. The Greek names of the deceased and her mother are also consistently written with Demotic characters.
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This chapter surveys magical and divinatory practices in Roman Egypt.