The Campbell Bonner Magical Gems Database

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Paul C Dilley

This database of magical gems, named after Campbell-Bonner’s famous collection of 1954, is in fact far more extensive, containing over 1,000 items. These are drawn from over 30 collections, including the British Museum, and the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, which is curating the website with the University of Fribourg, under the direction of an international editorial board. According to the site, the database, which is currently expanding, contains “a fourth of the known corpus of magical gems.” Its search functions allow the user to browse the gems by collection, material, place of discovery (only a few of which are known), iconographical schemes and elements, vocabulary (gem inscriptions in Greek and Latin), names, voces magicae, Logoi, and Characteres. The entries themselves contain this information, when available, along with digital images of the gems; these can even be sent as electronic postcards! There is a small glossary and bibliography, which has the helpful feature of noting the gems referred to in each entry. Clearly this is a major resource, which will become even more important as the site grows.

http://www2.szepmuveszeti.hu/talismans/

Morton Feldman’s “Turfan Fragments”

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Paul C Dilley

American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman’s “Turfan Fragments” (1980), a piece on the famous (East) Berlin collection now largely available online, can be listened to on YouTube, as performed by the Orchestra of the SEM Ensemble, with conductor Petr Kotik:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e49qbrz1sZU

As a connoisseur of fragmentary ancient texts, I found this agitated work unexpected and inspirational!

Elsewhere on YouTube, there is a documentary on Turfan (“A Heat Wave Called Turfan”), part of a 12-episode series on the Silk Road in English, with joint Japanese and Chinese production.

Manichaean Texts at the Digitales Turfan-Archiv and TITUS

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Paul C Dilley

The Iranian texts discovered at the beginning of the 20^th-century during the German excavations of the Turfan oasis constitute a major source for modern scholarship on Manichaeism; like the Nag Hammadi Library, they provide an important corrective to the exclusively polemical accounts that had survived the manuscript transmission. The numerous textual fragments have been patiently published over the past century by a number of scholars, and this critical project is still ongoing.

The Turfanforschung group at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften has published to the web the Digitales Turfan-Archiv, which includes a variety of literature from the Turfan oasis, including “Texte in Manichäischer Schrift,” in the Parthian and Middle Persian languages, as well as some in Old Turkic. This section contains high-resolution images of basically the entire run of texts in Manichaean script, more than 9,200 fragments, catalogued according to the more recent “M” categorization cited in contemporary scholarship (from Mary Boyce’s A Catalogue of the Iranian Manuscripts in Manichaean Script in the German Turfan Collection [Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1960]); the glass plates show the former “T” categorization:

http://www.bbaw.de/forschung/turfanforschung/dta/

The Middle Persian and Parthian eTexts for many of these documents is available from TITUS at the University of Frankfurt:

http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/indexe.htm?/texte/texte2.htm

The Virtual Magic Bowl Archive (VMBA) and Prosopography

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Paul C Dilley

The Virtual Magic Bowl Archive is a collaborative environment for the publication of magic bowls in the Moussaieff, Dehays, and Barakat collections. It is housed at the University of Southampton, under the direction of Dr. Dan Levene, with a number of other prominent collaborators in Europe, Israel, and North America. While the archive, which includes photographs and transcriptions, currently has restricted access, The VMBA site contains several useful resources and descriptions of ongoing projects. These include the Aramaic Magical Texts from Late Antiquity (AMTLA), a BIRAX project conducted by Dr. Dan Levene and Prof. Gideon Bohak, part of which is the valuable prosopography of the Babylonian Magic Bowls, compiled by Dr. Ortal-Paz Saar of Tel Aviv University Continue reading →

Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller and Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Online

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Paul C Dilley

Significant portions of two magisterial series of critical editions for Christian texts from Late Antiquity can be easily downloaded from enumerated lists linked to archive.org and Google Books: Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller (GCS), available at Roger Pearse and Patrologia Latina, Graeca, & Orientalis (PLGO; through Scribd); and Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL), also available at Roger Pearse and the PLGO. While all of the texts from the series Sources Chrétiennes, founded in 1942, are still under copyright, useful information on the many volumes can be found on the Institute’s website. Similarly, Brepols Corpus Christianorum, and its various subseries, are under copyright; the Series Latina is available by subscription in the Library of Latin Texts.

Léxico de magia y religion en los papiros mágicos griegos

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Paul C Dilley

The LMPG en línea is a digitized version of Luis Muñoz Delgado’s Léxico de magia y religion en los papiros mágicos griegos (2001), volume 5 of the Diccionario Griego-Español. One can brose the particular vocabulary of the Greek magical papyri in alphabetical order (“Lemas”), or in the form of a reverse dictionary (“Inverso”), a wonderful tool for reconstructing lacunose texts. Finally, one can browse through the magical papyri themselves, or at least the selections from them that are quoted in the dictionary; and search for key words in Greek or Spanish (“Búsqueda”). There is also a helpful section on the history of scholarship on magic, as well as the project’s lexicographical methodology, followed by a bibliography. Continue reading →

Ancient Iran: Courses and Grammars by Prods Oktor Skjærvø

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Paul C Dilley

Prods Oktor Skjærvø, the Agha Khan Professor of Iranian Studies at Harvard University, has published online an impressive series of courses and grammars on ancient Iran (and Central Asia), from the Avestan period to the Middle Ages. Continue reading →

Hieroi Logoi

Digital Resources for Religion in Late Antiquity