Intern
  • Auszüge aus magischen Texten aus Kulturen des Altertums (Griechisch, Hieratisch, Demotisch, Akkadisch): British Library P 122; British Museum P Chester Beatty 7 und P Leiden/London; BM 34065
DFG Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe MagEIA

Fellowship Report

Coptic is the latest form of the Egyptian language, written in a modified version of the Greek alphabet from around the third century of the common era onwards. While it was often a subordinate language – with Greek and later Arabic as the languages of government, culture and science – it would have been the mother-tongue of most Egyptians until around the tenth century or so, when Arabic began to become predominant even among Egyptian Christians. For this reason, magical texts in Coptic allow us to see very clearly the responses of normal men and women to the crises in their lives which led to them seeking magical help – problems of health, requiring healing amulets, or social problems requiring love spells or attacks in the form of curses. We also see in them the process of religious change, with the earliest (Old) Coptic texts containing invocations of the traditional Egyptian deities, while later ones are predominantly Christian, but often incorporate figures drawn from Gnosticism, and, from around the tenth century, the influence of Islam.

Better understanding the Coptic magical papyri has been the goal of my two projects The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Roman and Early Islamic Egypt (2018-2023) and Corpus of Coptic Magical Formularies (2024-2027), and I was very grateful to have the chance to explore this topic more within the scope of MagEIA for six months in 2024.

My work over this time focused on several smaller ongoing projects. Much of my ongoing work consists of editing Greek and Coptic texts, either magical, or testifying to related popular religious practices, and MagEIA was very helpful in providing a forum to discuss this translation work. Three new translations which I worked on during this time will be published in the near future. The first is of a pair of sixth-century oracle questions in Greek addressed to Saint Philoxenos, who had a shrine at Oxyrhynchus, asking whether the questioner should buy a banking business. This practice of addressing questions was a very ancient one in Egypt, attested by the Third Intermediate Period, and revived in the Christian period in the context of saints’ shrines. The second is a rare Coptic ritual for bowl divination, dating to the eighth or ninth century, in which a spirit would be summoned to appear in a bowl of water and answer questions. The third is a small amulet against snakebites which is “powered” by a number of interesting names – the famous Sator-sequence of Latin origin, the names of the three magi (often known as “wise men”) from the Gospel of Matthew, and so on. The first two of these will be published in the forthcoming collection Prayer in the Ancient Mediterranean World, and the third in a volume entitled Textual Amulets in the Mediterranean World edited by Christopher A. Faraone, Carolina López-Ruiz and Sofía Torallas Tovar.

Another important question in my work is the presence of Coptic in the early, primarily Greek-language handbooks. These usually represent a range of archaic forms of the language, known as Old Coptic. Despite the fact that Old Coptic is poorly attested, and imperfectly understood, it is very important for our understanding of the Egyptian language as a whole. Old Coptic texts often preserve grammatical forms and vocabulary found in hieroglyphic and demotic texts but lost in standard Christian Coptic. They also reveal the process by which Coptic itself developed: in the early centuries of our era, Egyptian priests developed Old Coptic systems as a tool to help them in reading the older script. One of these Old Coptic systems was apparently adopted by Christians around the third century, perhaps specifically to translate the Bible and other Christian texts. The details of this process remain unclear, but the study of Old Coptic texts, many of which are magical, can help us understand this process better. During my time as a fellow, I produced a two-part study of the Egyptian language in PGM IV, the “Great Magical Papyrus of Paris”, the largest surviving Greek magical text, dated to the fourth century CE. This study looked at Egyptian words borrowed into Greek – both practical words, like kyphi (a type of incense), used in ritual instructions, and the names of gods like Psoi (Pshai, a serpentine god of fate in Roman Egypt), often used in magical formulae. It also examined the six Old Coptic sections in this predominantly Greek work, exploring their linguistic features and their relationship to older Egyptian and later standard Coptic. This work revealed that the Egyptian-language words and sections contain many different influences – some of the texts seem to be hundreds of years older than the manuscript which preserves them, and to have been composed in Lower Egypt, where Alexandria – the presumed place of composition of many magical texts – was located, but from which we have almost no papyri. Other texts seem to have been more local, showing signs of circulation in the Theban region around modern Luxor where the manuscript was found. Both of these articles will be published in a larger study of PGM IV in preparation by its editors, Christopher A. Faraone and Sofía Torallas Tovar.

A third ongoing theme of my work is the study of drawings in the magical papyri, and so the last article I worked on in this time is a reflexion on the use of images in Graeco-Egyptian magic – both papyri and gems – and the way in which it continues and transforms older Egyptian ideas about the power of apparently inanimate images. This study will be published in a volume entitled Immortal Egypt, edited by Luisa Capodieci and Laurent Bricault, resulting from a series of colloquia of the same title.

I am very grateful to the MagEIA principal investigators, Prof. Dr. Daniel Schwemer, Prof. Dr. Daniel Kölligan, Prof. Dr. Martin Stadler, for offering me the chance to work with them and the other members of the MagEIA team, including my fellow fellows. The discussions in the weekly seminars, as well as the informal talks over lunch, dinner and coffee, and the regular public lectures were a wonderful way for me to learn more about other magical and ritual traditions, and get helpful feedback on my ongoing work. I look forward to working more with them as their neighbour in the new Corpus of Coptic Magical Formularies project, which began in September of last year.

Publications

  • Dosoo, Korshi. “‘He Means “Rose”’: Marginal Notes in the Greek Papyri of the Theban Magical Library”, in Magic and Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Studies in Honor of Christopher A. Faraone, edited by Radcliffe G: Edmonds III, Carolina López-Ruiz, and Sofía Torallas Tovar. Oxon: Routledge, 2024, 37–70.
  • Dosoo, Korshi ‘A New Publication of the London Hay Archive’ (review of Elizabeth R. O’Connell (editor), The Hay Archive of Coptic Spells on Leather: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to the Materiality of Magical Practice (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 2022), Journal of Coptic Studies 26 (2024) 287-298.
  • Dosoo, Korshi. ‘(Post-)Colonialism and Ancient Magic’, in the Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Katherine Blouin and Ben Akrigg, London: Routledge, 2024, 280–300.

Forthcoming:

  • Dosoo, Korshi.  “Aesthetics and Power: Egyptian Image-Magic in the Roman Empire”, in Immortal Egypt. The Afterlife of the Ægyptiaca in Early Modern Visual Arts, edited by Luisa Capodieci and Laurent Bricault (Turnhout: Brepols, 19 pages).
  • Dosoo, Korshi. “Les décans dans le christianisme égyptien et au-delà de l’astrologie’” in Les tablettes zodiacales de Grand (Vosges), edited by Michel Dabas and Thierry Dechezlepretre (St Josse: HD, 17 pages).
  • Dosoo, Korshi. “Egyptian Linguistic Influence in GEMF 57/PGM IV, Part 1: The Greek Text”, in New Approaches to the Great Paris Magical Codex (PGM IV/GEMF 57), edited by Christopher Faraone and Sofía Torallas Tovar (De Gruyter, forthcoming, 28 pages).
  • Dosoo, Korshi. “Egyptian Linguistic Influence in GEMF 57/PGM IV, Part 2: The Old Coptic Texts”, in New Approaches to the Great Paris Magical Codex (PGM IV/GEMF 57), edited by Christopher Faraone and Sofía Torallas Tovar (Berlin: De Gruyter, 56 pages).
  • Dosoo, Korshi. “Gatherings of Words: Notes on Books of Magic from Roman Egypt”, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture (12 pages).
  • Dosoo, Korshi. “Notes on Depictions of Suppressing Evil in Coptic Magical Texts”, in Annihilating Evil: Scenes of Fighting, Slaying, Trampling and Binding Bad Forces in Art, edited by Magdalena Łaptaś (Travaux de l’Institut des Cultures Méditerranéennes et Orientales de l’Académie Polonaise des Sciences, forthcoming, 15 pages).
  • Dosoo, Korshi. “Oracular Inquiries Concerning Banking (PGM P 8a and 24)”, in Prayer in the Ancient Mediterranean World, edited by Daniel K. Falk and Rodney A. Werline (Leiden: Brill, 10 pages).
  • Dosoo, Korshi. “P. CtYBR inv. 1792 qua”, in Textual Amulets in the Mediterranean World 1000 BCE-1000 CE, edited by Christopher A. Faraone, Carolina López-Ruiz and Sofía Torallas Tovar (2 pages).
  • Dosoo, Korshi. “Ritual for Divination using a Cup of Water  (BM EA 10391 ro ll. 38–49)”, in Prayer in the Ancient Mediterranean World, edited by Daniel K. Falk and Rodney A. Werline (Leiden: Brill, 13 pages).
  • Dosoo, Korshi. “Die Tochter des Teufels und die Kindermörderin: Dämonen in koptischen magischen Papyri“, in Antike Welt (7 pages).