The study of the Syriac magical traditions has largely been marginalised within Syriac studies, with the earliest treatments displaying a disparaging attitude towards both the culture and its magical practices. Despite significant progress in more recent scholarship in respect of the culture, its magical practices and their associated literatures remain on the margins of the scholarly imagination. This volume aims to open a discussion on the history of the field, to evaluate how things have progressed, and to suggest a fruitful way forward. In doing so, this volume demonstrates the incredible riches contained within the Syriac magical traditions, and the necessity of their study.

With contributions spanning from the Neolithic Age to the Iron Age, this book offers important insights into the religions and ritual practices in ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern communities through the lenses of their material remains. The book begins with a theoretical introduction to the concept of material religion and features editor introductions to each of its six parts, which tackle the following themes: the human body; religious architecture; the written word; sacred images; the spirituality of animals; and the sacred role of the landscape. Illustrated with over 100 images, chapters provide insight into every element of religion and materiality, from the largest building to the smallest amulet. This is a benchmark work for further studies on material religion in the ancient Near East and Egypt.

This volume includes cutting-edge research on the spread of Syrian Christianity along the Silk Road from the 6th to the 14th century. Recent archaeological discoveries and excavations of ancient and medieval Christian sites in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and China shed new light on Christian communities in Central Asia, China and Mongolia. Scholars from such fields as archaeology, manuscript studies, history and theology have contributed, offering new insights into the influence of Syriac Christianity along the Silk Roads.

This book is a re-edition and detailed study of a parchment codex from Egypt of the fourth century CE with Greek and Coptic recipes for healing through magic and pharmacology (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library Ms. 136). A text and annotated translation were published in a brief journal article by William H. Worrell in 1935, but the codex has been understudied since then. This new edition offers advances in readings and interpretation, a thorough philological commentary, and accompanying studies on the ritual and medical traditions to which the codex belongs and its position in the linguistic landscape of Egypt. The recipes comprise magical rituals for healing and broader personal advancement, pharmacological and related medical recipes, and advice for the management of a household. Traditional Egyptian religion and ritual are illustrated in interaction with medical practices of Hellenic culture more recently introduced to Egypt, and the archaic, even poetic language of some of the Coptic invocations featuring the Egyptian gods Amun and Thoth share pages with an incantation constructed from the verses of Homer.

The Achaemenid period (550-330 BCE) is rightly seen as one of the most formative periods in Judaism. It is the period in which large portions of the Bible were edited and redacted and others were authored--yet no dedicated interdisciplinary study has been undertaken to present a consistent picture of this decisive time period. This book is dedicated to the study of the touchpoints between Yahwistic communities throughout the Achaemenid empire and the Iranian attributes of the empire that ruled over them for about two centuries. Its approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary. It brings together scholars of Achaemenid history, literature and religion, Iranian linguistics, historians of the Ancient Near East, archeologists, biblical scholars and Semiticists. The goal is to better understand the interchange of ideas, expressions and concepts as well as the experience of historical events between Yahwists and the empire that ruled over them for over two centuries. The book will open up a holisitic perspective on this important era to scholars of a wide variety of fields in the study of Judaism in the Ancient Near East.

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.

This volume offers a critical edition and annotated translation of twenty metrical homilies attributed to Isaac of Antioch, a late fifth-century CE Syriac poet. The works in this collection, the majority of which are examples of the Syriac rebuke genre, are aimed at the moral reformation of the Syrian Christian community. The introduction, which provides the first detailed study of the manuscript tradition of the corpus as a whole, identifies four different Isaacs whose writings were intermingled already in late antiquity and develops criteria for distinguishing among their works. Scholars and students of church history will find this a valuable resource for the study of Syriac poetry and homiletics, Christian ideas of moral reform, and late antique monastic and lay devotional culture.

The Jewish culture of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods established a basis for all monotheistic religions, but its main sources have been preserved to a great degree through Christian transmission. This Guide is devoted to problems of preservation, reception, and transformation of Jewish texts and traditions of the Second Temple period in the many Christian milieus from the ancient world to the late medieval era. It approaches this corpus not as an artificial collection of reconstructed texts--a body of hypothetical originals--but rather from the perspective of the preserved materials, examined in their religious, social, and political contexts. It also considers the other, non-Christian, channels of the survival of early Jewish materials, including Rabbinic, Gnostic, Manichaean, and Islamic. This unique project brings together scholars from many different fields in order to map the trajectories of early Jewish texts and traditions among diverse later cultures. It also provides a comprehensive and comparative introduction to this new field of study while bridging the gap between scholars of early Judaism and of medieval Christianity.

Magic and the Supernatural in Fourth Century Syria presents an in-depth investigation of a variety of ‘magical’ practices with a focused study in the late antique Syria and Palestine. Offering new research using both archaeological and literary sources, and blending Classical, Jewish, and Christian traditions from both regions, Silke Trzcionka examines a myriad of magical activities such as: curses, spells and amulets accusations related to chariot races, love and livelihood methods involved in protection, healing, possession and exorcism. The information is provided with clarity and theoretical sophistication which enables students to develop an understanding of these beliefs and their place within the social context of the time. Altogether, a useful, enlightening and enjoyable book which students studying religion and/or social history will find invaluable.