The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books, and Individual Recipes (New Texts From Ancient Cultures) - Hardcover

Faraone, Christopher; Torallas Tovar, Sofia

 
9780472133277: The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books, and Individual Recipes (New Texts From Ancient Cultures)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0472133276 ISBN 13: 9780472133277
Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2022

Synopsis

In Greco-Roman Egypt, recipes for magical undertaking, called magical formularies, commonly existed for love potions, curses, attempts to best business rivals—many of the same challenges that modern people might face. In The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books, and Individual Recipes, volume editors Christopher Faraone and Sofia Torallas Tovar present a series of essays by scholars involved in a multiyear project to reedit and translate the various magical handbooks that were inscribed in the Roman period in the Greek or Egyptian languages.  For the first time, the material remains of these papyrus rolls and codices are closely examined, revealing important information about the production of books in Egypt, the scribal culture in which they were produced, and the traffic in single recipes copied from them.  Especially important for historians of the book and the Christian Bible are new insights in the historical shift from roll to codex, complicated methods of inscribing the bilingual papyri (in which the Greek script is written left to right and the demotic script right to left), and the new realization that several of the longest extant handbooks are clearly compilations of two or more shorter handbooks, which may have come from different places.  The essays also reexamine and rethink the idea that these handbooks came from the personal libraries of practicing magicians or temple scriptoria, in one case going so far as to suggest that two of the handbooks had literary pretensions of a sort and were designed to be read for pleasure rather than for quotidian use in making magical recipes.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Christopher A. Faraone is Edward Olson Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago.

Sofía Torallas Tovar is Professor of Classics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
University of Michigan Press
Publication date
2022
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0472133276
ISBN 13 
9780472133277
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
562