This volume provides the first comprehensive text edition of the Egyptian language sections of P. Bibliothèque Nationale Supplément Grec. 574 (PGM IV) and analysis of their script, language, and the bilingual spells which they are part of. The magical practices preserved in the PDM and PGM have been published for nearly a century, yet it is only recently that research has focused on investigating the complex relationship between the languages, scripts, and religious traditions they exhibit, as well as the question of who composed, copied, and practiced these spells. Focusing on the bilingual divinations, lust spell, and exorcism of PGM IV, written in the Egyptian and Greek languages - and rendered in Old Coptic scripts and the Greek script respectively - this volume analyses their textual content and ritual mechanics, contextualised among the PDM and PGM, and investigates the potential identities of the magical practitioners of late Roman and Late Antique Egypt. Encompassing the disciplines of Egyptology, Coptology, Papyrology, and Late Antique studies, this volume focuses in particular on the themes of magical practice, bilingualism, script, and the social context of magic in Egypt during the 2nd to 4th centuries CE.

This volume provides the first comprehensive text edition of the Egyptian language sections of P. Bibliothèque Nationale Supplément Grec. 574 (PGM IV) and analysis of their script, language, and the bilingual spells which they are part of. The magical practices preserved in the PDM and PGM have been published for nearly a century, yet it is only recently that research has focused on investigating the complex relationship between the languages, scripts, and religious traditions they exhibit, as well as the question of who composed, copied, and practiced these spells. Focusing on the bilingual divinations, lust spell, and exorcism of PGM IV, written in the Egyptian and Greek languages - and rendered in Old Coptic scripts and the Greek script respectively - this volume analyses their textual content and ritual mechanics, contextualised among the PDM and PGM, and investigates the potential identities of the magical practitioners of late Roman and Late Antique Egypt. Encompassing the disciplines of Egyptology, Coptology, Papyrology, and Late Antique studies, this volume focuses in particular on the themes of magical practice, bilingualism, script, and the social context of magic in Egypt during the 2nd to 4th centuries CE.

Explores in depth how bilingualism in the correspondence of elite Romans illuminates their lives, relationships and identities.

This book is a re-edition and detailed study of a parchment codex from Egypt of the fourth century CE with Greek and Coptic recipes for healing through magic and pharmacology (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library Ms. 136). A text and annotated translation were published in a brief journal article by William H. Worrell in 1935, but the codex has been understudied since then. This new edition offers advances in readings and interpretation, a thorough philological commentary, and accompanying studies on the ritual and medical traditions to which the codex belongs and its position in the linguistic landscape of Egypt. The recipes comprise magical rituals for healing and broader personal advancement, pharmacological and related medical recipes, and advice for the management of a household. Traditional Egyptian religion and ritual are illustrated in interaction with medical practices of Hellenic culture more recently introduced to Egypt, and the archaic, even poetic language of some of the Coptic invocations featuring the Egyptian gods Amun and Thoth share pages with an incantation constructed from the verses of Homer.

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.

In The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian H. Bull argues that the treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus reflect the spiritual exercises and ritual practices of loosely organized brotherhoods in Egypt. These small groups were directed by Egyptian priests educated in the traditional lore of the temples, but also conversant with Greek philosophy. Such priests, who were increasingly dispossessed with the gradual demise of the Egyptian temples, could find eager adherents among a Greek-speaking audience seeking for the wisdom of the Egyptian Hermes, who was widely considered to be an important source for the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato. The volume contains a comprehensive analysis of the myths of Hermes Trismegistus, a reevaluation of the Way of Hermes, and a contextualization of this ritual tradition.

The earliest written references to the Osirian myth-complex appeared already in the Pyramid Text spells (c. 2400–2300 BCE). The most complete exposition of this ancient Egyptian myth is, however, found in the Greek treatise On Isis and Osiris, in which the 2nd-century CE Platonist Plutarch utilises Egyptian mythology to advocate his philosophical ideas concerning the divine and the nature of the cosmos. This book aims at “decoding” Plutarch’s narrative of the Osirian myth, linking his claims to the existing Egyptian and Greek parallels. It thus analyses a multitude of mythic and religious traditions from a transcultural perspective, exploring the relation of the Pharaonic features of the Osirian divinities to the features they had acquired in Ptolemaic and Roman times, interpreting the Egyptian myth within the overall framework of parallel mythologies from other cultures, and examining whether the brief mythic stories (historiolae) recited in Late Egyptian ritual texts can be deployed to enrich the context of certain obscure episodes in Plutarch’s account of the myth. The book will be of great interest not only to scholars and students of Plutarch and later Middle Platonism, but also to Egyptologists. Due to its thematic variety and scope, this publication will also appeal to a wider array of readers (specialists and non-specialists alike) interested in religious syncretism, interreligious connections, and the challenge of multiculturalism from Hellenistic times until Late Antiquity.

The complex linguistic situation of earlier multilingual Britain has led to numerous contact-induced changes in the history of English. However, bi- and multilingual texts, which are attested in a large variety of text types, are still an underresearched aspect of earlier linguistic contact. Such texts, which switch between Latin, English and French, have increasingly been recognized as instances of written code-switching and as highly relevant evidence for the linguistic strategies which medieval and early modern multilingual speakers used for different purposes. The contributions in this volume approach this phenomenon of mixed-language texts from the point of view of code-switching, an important mechanism of linguistic change. Based on a variety of text types and genres from the medieval and Early Modern English periods, the individual papers present detailed linguistic analyses of a large number of texts, addressing a variety of issues, including methodological questions as well as functional, pragmatic, syntactic and lexical aspects of language mixing. The very specific nature of language mixing in some text types also raises important theoretical questions such as the distinction between borrowing and switching, the existence of discrete linguistic codes in earlier multilingual Britain and, more generally, the possible limits of the code-switching paradigm for the analysis of these mixed texts from the early history of English. Thus the volume is of particular interest not only for historical linguists, medievalists and students of the history of English, but also for sociolinguists, psycholinguists, language theorists and typologists.

The ten studies in this book explore the phenomenon of public memory in societies of the Graeco-Roman period. Mendels begins with a concise discussion of the historical canon that emerged in Late Antiquity and brought with it the (distorted) memory of ancient history in Western culture. The following nine chapters each focus on a different source of collective memory in order to demonstrate the patchy and incomplete associations ancient societies had with their past, including discussions of Plato’s Politeia, a site of memory of the early church, and the dichotomy existing between the reality of the land of Israel in the Second Temple period and memories of it.Throughout the book, Mendels shows that since the societies of Antiquity had associations with only bits and pieces of their past, these associations could be slippery and problematic, constantly changing, multiplying and submerging. Memories, true and false, oral and inscribed, provide good evidence for this fluidity.