Papyri Copticae Magicae

This volume is the first in a new series of editions of Coptic-language "magical" manuscripts from Egypt, written on papyrus, ostraca, parchment, and paper, and dating to between the fourth and twelfth centuries CE. Their texts attest to non-institutional rituals intended to bring about changes in the lives of those who used them – heal disease, curse enemies, bring about love or hatred, or see into the future. These manuscripts represent rich sources of information on daily life and lived religion of Egypt in the last centuries of Roman rule and the first centuries after the Arab conquest, giving us glimpses of the hopes and fears of people of this time, their conflicts and problems, and their vision of the human and superhuman worlds. This volume presents 37 new editions and descriptions of manuscripts, focusing on formularies or "handbooks", those texts containing instructions for the performance of rituals. Each of these is accompanied by a history of its acquisition, a material description, and presented with facing text and translations, tracings of accompanying images, and explanatory notes to aid in understanding the text.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Ritual Boundaries, Joseph E. Sanzo transforms our understanding of how early Christians experienced religion in lived practice through the study of magical objects, such as amulets and grimoires. Against the prevailing view of late antiquity as a time when only so-called elites were interested in religious and ritual differentiation, the evidence presented here reveals that the desire to distinguish between religious and ritual insiders and outsiders cut across diverse social strata. The magical evidence also offers unique insight into early biblical reception, exposing a textual world in which scriptural reading was multisensory and multitraditional. As they addressed sickness, demonic struggle, and interpersonal conflicts, Mediterranean people thus acted in ways that challenge our conceptual boundaries between Christians and non-Christians; elites and non-elites; and words, materials, and images. Sanzo helps us rethink how early Christians imagined similarity and difference among texts, traditions, groups, and rituals as they went about their daily lives.

This handbook explores the ways in which histories of colonialism and postcolonial thought and theory cast light on our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world and the discipline of Classics, utilizing a wide body of case studies and providing avenues for future research and discussion. It brings together chapters by a wide, international, and intersectional range of scholars coming from a variety of backgrounds and sub-disciplinary perspectives, and from across the chronological and geographical scope of Classics. Chapters cover the state of current research into ancient Mediterranean and South, Central, and West Asian histories. They provide case studies to illustrate both how postcolonial thought has already illuminated our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond, as well as its potential for the future. Chapters also provide opportunities for reflection on the current state of the discipline. An introduction by the volume editors offers a survey of the development of postcolonial theory, its relationship to other bodies of theory, and its connections to Classics. Toward the end of the book, three scholars with different career and disciplinary perspectives provide short reflections on the themes of the volume and the directions of future research. The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory offers an impressive collection of current research and thought on the subject for students and scholars in classical studies understood in its larger sense as well as in related disciplines such as Archaeology, Ancient History, Imperial History and the History of Colonialism, Reception Studies, and Museum Studies. For anyone interested in classical antiquity, it provides an engaging introduction to a potentially bewildering, but ultimately vital and enriching, body of thought and theory.

I would like to extend my thanks to Dr. M.l Raven, the curator of the Egyptian Department of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, who granted permission to publish the photographs of J 384 and 395 and allowed me to inspect the originals, as weIl as to the museum's photographers, M.J. Bomhof and A. De Kemp, for providing the prints. My gratitude also goes to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for supporting this project, and to the Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften for including this volume in the present series and for a subsidy towards the cost of its publication. Finally I would like to thank R. Merkelbach for his help in connection with this project. Robert W. Daniel INTRODUCTION The papyri J 384 (previously V) and J 395 (previously W) of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden are now usually consulted in K. Preisendanz' standard edition, 2 Papyri Graecae Magicae (Stuttgart 1974), and referred to as PGM XII and XIII respective1y. These two large papyri are among the most important magical texts that have survived from late antiquity - especially J 395 with its famous 'Leiden Cosmogony'.

Annotation This collection challenges the tendency among scholars of ancient Greece to see magical and religious ritual as mutually exclusive and to ignore "magical" practices in Greek religion. The contributors survey specific bodies of archaeological, epigraphical, and papyrological evidence formagical practices in the Greek world, and, in each case, determine whether the traditional dichotomy between magic and religion helps in any way to conceptualize the objective features of the evidence examined. Contributors include Christopher A. Faraone, J.H.M. Strubbe, H.S. Versnel, Roy Kotansky, John Scarborough, Samuel Eitrem, Fritz Graf, John J. Winkler, Hans Dieter Betz, and C.R. Phillips.

The De aquis of Sextus Julius Frontinus is usually interpreted as either an administrative guide for the curator aquarum, or as a work of praise. It can be demonstrated, however, that Frontinus had another goal in writing. The book is more likely what we would call a political pamphlet, explaining a particular administrative reform, and encouraging those affected by that reform to cooperate with it. Frontinus wants to be sure that all concessions of aqueduct water to private individuals be made as proper grants by the emperor. In short, this curator aquarum is interested in regulating the flow of a particular beneficium, namely, aqueduct water, from the emperor to his elite subjects.