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/

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.

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 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, which covers the major corpora of bowls in the various dialects of Aramaic found in Sasanian and early Islamic Mesopotamia, i.e., Jewish Aramaic, Syriac, and Mandaic.  Additionally, the site describes Dan Levene’s Aggressive Jewish Aramaic Incantation Project, which resulted in a textual corpus, published as a print book; as well as his online introduction to the subject.

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. A number of corpora have been consulted for the creation of this dictionary/database: not only Preisendanz’s Papyri Graecae Magicae, but also both volumes of the Supplementum Magicum, and papyri outside of major collections.  Clearly, this is a major asset for those doing research on the Greek Magical Papyri.

http://dge.cchs.csic.es/lmpg/

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.  The latter encompass basic introductions (including English translations of selected primary sources) to Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, which I had the pleasure of taking as an undergraduate.  The former are grammars of Old and Young Avestan, Old Persian, and Manichaean Sogdian; his Pahlavi grammar is available for download at rabbinics.org.  For the most part, these languages lack introductory and/or reference grammars in English, or any language.  Skjærvø’s e-grammars are thus fundamental (and open access!) tools for studying the majority of Zoroastrian and Iranian Manichaean texts in their original languages.

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~iranian/

Image from http://inscriptions.etc.ucla.edu/

This fascinating and innovative project seeks to give users the experience of how statues (and their inscribed bases) constituted a collective memory among those who participated in the ritual space of the Late-Antique Roman Forum.  The PI of “Visualizing Statues” is Diana Favro of UCLA, with Chris Johanson as CI and Gregor Kalas as Fellow; it was developed in UCLA’s Experiental Technologies Center, with the support of the NEH.  The site is a model for a smooth interface between 3-d visualization of ancient monuments in their spatial context; 2-d plans of urban spaces; material culture, including statues bases with inscriptions; a timeline, between 284 and 526 CE; and even literary sources, namely Claudian’s portrait of the emperor Honorius’s Consular Procession in 404 CE, a compelling description of Late-Antique imperial ceremony used as a textual basis for framing the experience of the online audience.  The site is best navigated in HyperCities (itself developed jointly by UCLA and USC), which requires a Google-Earth plug-in: one can then view various 3-d reconstructions of the Late-Antique Roman cityscape (such as the Forum), including the associated statuary, which is the theoretical focus of the project. This display changes as one navigates through the footnoted narrative accompaniments in the site’s various sections: the “Introduction; “Ritual Experience,” which more or less follows the stages of Honorius’s procession as described by Claudian; “Spatial Context,” which explores the cultural significance of statuary in urban space; “Mapping Statues,” which features interactive plans displaying the location (both certain and uncertain) of statues, each with a generous description; and finally, a searchable “Inscription Database,” from the statue databases.  An extraordinary site in all respects!

http://inscriptions.etc.ucla.edu/

Vetus Latina Iohannes, also known as the Verbum Project, is an online, electronic critical edition of the Old Latin Gospel of John from the manuscripts (Patristic citations are not included at this point); it is one of the earliest online DH projects within early Christian studies, founded in 2002.  The Verbum Project is housed at the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, under the direction of David Parker.  Each of the manuscript witnesses is described, including previous editions and reproductions consulted, as well as notes on the features recorded in the Verbum Project’s transcription.  The edition, which is powered by Peter Robinson’s COLLATE software, can be viewed as a synopsis of all manuscript witnesses for a particular verse, or as continuous text from a given manuscript (and optionally, according to page format, which includes features such indentation, justified texts, the obeloi and other marks).

Of course, the optimal way to view page format is to include digital images of the manuscript next to the transcription; this is indeed offered for several important witnesses, such as Codex Veronensis, a luxurious purple-parchment text that E.A. Lowe dated to the fifth century.  The conventions of this electronic edition are interesting: in contrast to, for example, EpiDoc- based electronic corpora of inscriptions, most of which are displayed in formats imitating printed editions according to the Leiden conventions, the Verbum Project transcriptions use variations in color and font to record features such as uncertain characters or reconstructed text; text which has been corrected by a later hand is marked in blue, and the corrections themselves are displayed with a click.  One becomes quickly accustomed to these standards, which have a certain visual appeal.

http://www.iohannes.com/vetuslatina/

http://www.vetuslatina.org/