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.

The papers of the volume mirror the ongoing debate on approaches towards two related topics: conjunction and ellipsis. The major issues are the syntactic relationship between the conjuncts, the syntactic category of the conjunction words, the size of the conjuncts, the syntactic and semantic status of the null elements, and semantic and information structural restrictions. A wide range of facts from various languages are explored in relation to phrasal coordination, Gapping, Pseudogapping, VP-ellipsis, and Sluicing.

This meticulous textual-historical study explains why medieval theologians disputed whether or not the human body assimilated food, and traces the evolution of the question. It illumines the development of scholastic method and the changing attitude of theologians to natural philosophy and medicine.

Early Skepticism and its founder, Pyrrho of Elis, were introduced to the world in the third century BCE by the poet and philosopher Timon of Phlius. This is the first book-length study in English of the fragments of Timon’s works. Of his more than 100 titles, four fragments remain of a catalogue elegy, the Indalmoi, and 133 verses of the Silloi, a hexameter parody in three books in which Timon ridicules philosophers of all periods whom he observes on a trip to Hades. Dee L. Clayman reconstructs the books of the Silloi starting from an outline in Diogenes Laertius and the book numbers assigned to a few fragments by their sources. This has not been attempted since Wachsmuth’s edition of 1885, and carries his approach further by careful observation of syntactic and contextual clues in the text. Using the Greek text of Lloyd-Jones and Parsons of 1983, all of the extant fragments are translated into English and discussed as literature, rather than as source material for the history of philosophy. Separate chapters demonstrate that the principle Hellenistic poets, Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius of Rhodes, were aware of Timon’s work specifically, and of Skepticism generally. The book concludes with a definition of “Skeptical aesthetics” that places many of the characteristic features of Hellenistic literature in a skeptical milieu.

Images and inscriptions on monuments can show us how priests and cult personnel saw themselves and were viewed by others, illuminating the social and political identity of these figures within their polis. Dedications and donations by cult personnel, and the honours that they earned, demonstrate their claim on the city’s attention and their financial power. The cityscape itself came to be shaped, in varying intensities and forms, by statues in honour of cult personnel, set up by relatives, fellow citizens and other groups. This set of cultural records, analysed in the studies presented here, is central to understanding how the roles of priests and priestesses were constructed in social and political terms in post-classical Athens. The approaches are both historical and archaeological, and elucidate the religious functions that the cult personnel fulfilled for the city, and their perception, by themselves and by others, as citizens of the polis.

This volume contains a series of provocative essays that explore expressions of magic and ritual power in the ancient world. The strength of the present volume lies in the breadth of scholarly approaches represented. The book begins with several papyrological studies presenting important new texts in Greek and Coptic, continuing with essays focussing on taxonomy and definition. The concluding essays apply contemporary theories to analyses of specific test cases in a broad variety of ancient Mediterranean cultures. Paul Mirecki, Th.D. (1986) in Religious Studies, Harvard Divinity School, is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. Marvin Meyer, Ph.D. (1979) in Religion, Claremont Graduate School, is Professor of Religion at Chapman University, Orange, California, and Director of the Coptic Magical Texts Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity.

The story of David and Goliath existed in antiquity in two variant literary editions, a short version found in the Greek tradition of Codex Vaticanus (LXXB) and a longer version found in the Hebrew tradition of the MT. Benjamin J. M. Johnson proposes that each version is worthy of study in its own right and offers a close literary reading of the narrative of David and Goliath in the Greek text of 1 Reigns 16-18. The author explores a method for reading the Septuagint that recognizes it is both a document in its own right and a translation of a Hebrew original. In offering a reading of the septuagintal version of the David and Goliath narrative, the literary difference between the two versions of the story and the literary significance of the Greek translation are highlighted.

How to Decipher the Byblos Script' reflects the lifelong research and publications by Dr. Jan Best. This volume brings together his most groundbreaking articles. At the center of the work of Dr. Best is his remarkable achievement of deciphering the Byblos Script. This could never have been achieved without the previous reconstructions of the Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A scripts, which are closely related to the Byblos Script. Here are the results of 40 years of frontier research quietly carried out behind the scenes of the scientific community. This publication for the first time discloses to the general public the impact of this research and makes its findings accessible to the wider public of the interested general reader and other specialists in this field. It represents the type of basic research fundamental to any scientific follow-up studies.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral - Los Angeles) under the title: In the beginnings: the apotropaic use of scriptural incipits in late antique Egypt.