Magica Levantina: An edition of mainly unpublished Greek magical inscriptions from the late ancient Levant, with a web portal containing photographic, desriptive and textual documentation of the objects

• Applicant: Dr. Robert Daniel
• Subject Area: Greek and Latin Philology ; Classical, Roman, Christian and Islamic Archaeology ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 285891763

The goal of the project is to complete Vol. 1 of the project Magica Levantina (ML) together with a ML Web Portal. Vol. 1 is now planned to contain 37 mainly unpublished Greek magical texts (mostly curses) written on metal tablets (III–VI AD) from the Levant. The Web Portal will present photographic documentation, descriptive information, texts and translations. The texts are being edited according to traditional philological methodology. The Web Portal, on the other hand, features a technological novelty, at least in the fields of Greek and Latin epigraphy, by making photographic documentation of the tablets created by Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) directly available to the public. It had originally been planned that Vol. I and the corresponding part of the Website would be finished by March 2019 and that with a 2-year extension the entire project could be completed. But plans have had to be revised partly owing to the time needed to decipher the great amount of very difficult text. Vol. 1 and the corresponding part of the Web Portal should be completed by March 2020. A new proposal will be submitted for the remainder of the work.ML Vol. 1 will contain 20 Greek curse tablets found in 1994 during American excavations at Promontory Palace in Caesarea Maritima and housed in the Israel Antiquities Authority; another curse from Ceasarea in a private collection; 11 Greek curse tablets (and an Aramaic one) housed in Princeton University Art Museum, mostly unpublished since they were found in 1934–35 during the Franco-American Antioch-and-Vicinity Excavations; and 4 amulets of diverse Levantine provenance.All these texts provide new documentation for various mixtures of the Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, and Orphic religions that characterize late antique magic. They also contain a great variety of details that shed new light on a broad spectrum of aspects of the ancient world. Here a few examples: Not only known types of materia magica (e.g., human hair) but also unknown types (sage, caterpillar remains), all with magical significance, were found with some of the tablets. Four curses against business men found in a single house in Antioch suggest that they had shops in that house. The circus curses, against named horses and charioteers, vary greatly: some show for the first time that charioteers had other professions as well; others cite a hitherto unknown Neoplatonic source; and yet another turns out to contain the only known curse written in Jewish Aramaic. An amulet to protect a women against epilepsy is the smallest known example of ancient Greek micrography. A curse against a pantomime dancer in Caesarea, written about 400 AD, is historically significant, for with a few other bits of evidence it suggests that the Ptolemies introduce the Egyptian crocodile cult into Palestine when they ruled the area 500 years earlier.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Alexander Hollmann