Graeco-Aegyptiaca | Raquel Martín-Hernández: Composing Magical Formularies in Late Antique Egypt

The Graeco-Aegyptiaca online seminar started in January 2022 with papers given monthly by established scholars in the field of Egyptian and Greek cultural relations. The second season's fourth event „Composing Magical Formularies in Late Antique Egypt” was held by Raquel Martín-Hernández (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) on 28 February 2023.

The so-called Greek Magical Papyri form one of the most interesting and strange groups of ancient texts surviving on papyrus from the Roman period. They were published as individual texts almost since their discovery, but re-edited as a corpus thanks to the joint efforts of a group of scholars under the leadership of K. Preisendanz (1924–1928). The edition of these texts has been fundamental for the study of magical and vernacular religious practices in Greco-Roman Egypt. In recent years, the project “Transmission of Magical Knowledge in Antiquity”, based in Chicago, has been working on a new critical edition of the Greco-Egyptian magical formularies in which the study of the text is combined with information offered by the material study of the books themselves. Until recently, scholarship has tended to view the magical papyri as a monolithic block; thanks to the Chicago project, we are learning to see just how varied and diverse these papyri are. Written mostly in Greek, these texts constitute one of the most interesting, and still largely untapped, resources for the study of Greco-Egyptian cultural interaction in the Roman Empire.

The lecture belongs in this trend of research and aims to provide an overview of the preserved Greco-Egyptian magical formularies, discussing their particularities and similarities. Certain magical books in particular will be studied in order to present ideas on how magical knowledge was transmitted in Roman Egypt, and for whom the production of such magnificent books may have been destined.

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Graeco-Aegyptiaca is a collaborative initiative by colleagues in the fields of Egyptology and Classics based in Hungary and the United Kingdom. The project aims to bring together researchers interested in the history of cultural interaction between Egyptians and Greeks from the very beginning to the Byzantine period.

Further information:
University College London - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/classics/graeco...
The Palladion - https://www.palladion.hu/en/graeco-ae...