Ortal-Paz Saar

Dan Levene

Siam Bhayro

James Nathan Ford

Aramaic Magic Bowls in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin presents a description of the Vorderasiatisches Museum’s magic bowls, including details of users and other names, biblical quotations, parallel texts, and linguistic features. Furthermore, sixteen texts, which are representative of the whole collection, are edited.

Descriptive List and Edition of Selected Texts

Aramaic Magic Bowls in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin

This book is a unique collection of Jewish magical texts from Late Antiquity. These consist of spells for protection against a wide variety of supernatural entities, demons, ghouls, and ghosts that were thought to be the cause of humanity's misfortunes. Texts in this collection include spells for the protection of the unborn and new-born baby and for warding off afflictions of the region of the head and belly, evil spirits in general, and human enemies. The magic bowls from which the incantations in this book have been transcribed are a form of amulet which was peculiar to the Mesopotamian regions of modern day Iran and Iraq of the fourth to seventh centuries A.D. These magical texts were individually commissioned by people whose names are usually mentioned within the texts. After having been written by sorcerer -scribes on the inside of earthenware bowls these were buried upside down under the floor of the client's house. These texts are an early testament to Jewish magical textual traditions, elements of which can be traced throughout history to modern-day practices. Levene's book makes available new and exciting material from an area of which little has been published so far.

Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity

A Corpus of Magic Bowls

In this book, Dan Levene analyses a corpus of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls from Mesopotamia, whose purpose was to curse or return curses against human adversaries. He presents new editions of thirty texts, with an introduction, commentary and glossaries.

Dan Levene

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