Episode 31

The Papyri Graecae Magicae & The Theban Magical Library Part 1 – Who, What, Where, When

Welcome to the Poison Room, a podcast about bits of paper, or things like paper, that people have written things on that have been bad, or perceived as bad, in some way. It has definitely been only a week since the last episode.

Fresh on the heels of an episode title including the phrase ‘part one’ you may be forgiven for expecting this episode to be a continuation of our story of Moses and his books. Last episode we covered where the idea of Moses as the author of books of magic emerged from, and we finished by finally getting to something called The Eighth Book of Moses – a text which is part of what we call the Greek Magical Papyri, or, PGM for short or, now, part of a larger collection of texts called the Graeco-Egyptian Magical Formularies, or GEMF for short. And then I realised that talking about the Eighth Book of Moses required quite a lot of context and that I might as well just do an episode about Graeco-Egyptian magical texts in general rather than to try and shunt an incredibly abbreviated explanation into the same episode as trying to talk in detail about the Eighth Book of Moses. And talking about Graeco-Egyptian magical texts is something I’d planned to do at some point anyway. So we’re gonna cover Graeco-Egyptian magical texts in general and then we’ll get back to the specific Graeco-Egyptian magical text that is the Eighth Book of Moses.

Just because of how this story starts I’m going to refer to texts by their PGM numbers, but if you’re a giant nerd and really want to know their equivalent GEMF number, then you’ll find them written in the transcript each time the text is mentioned. There’s a discussion to be had about the exact nomenclature that should be used here – and in general, our words and phrases for ‘magic’, ‘ritual’, ‘religious rite’, etc. all have blurry boundaries and cultural baggage. The same is true for ancient terms, and the boundaries aren’t always in the same places. What we mean by ‘magic’ is not exactly the same as what people in antiquity would mean by the words we’re translating as ‘magic’. I am not going to have that discussion here. Just bear in mind that when you hear the word ‘spell’ the idea you have is not gonna match precisely onto what ancient Greeks, Egyptians, or Romans thought when they heard the word.

So as you may expect for an episode on magical papyri in antiquity, we’re starting with the French Revolution.

The revolution began in 1789, and rumbled on being a big, complicated mess for years. In 1793 France had indulged in some light regicide, and in its place the First French Republic had emerged, governed by The Directory – a five-man committee in charge of everything, and which comprised men elected by The Council of Ancients – the ‘upper house’ – from a list prepared by the Council of 500 – the ‘lower house’. Political stability is not a concept that it applicable to France during this period. Things are a mess internally – different factions – including royalists – are trying to establish themselves and get some political power, and externally there are a bunch of other European countries who – even before the execution of Louis the 16th – were like ‘oh I guess we should go to war with France before this revolution thing becomes a popular export.’

There are a series of wars, the first of which we now refer to as ‘The War of the First Coalition’, which, weirdly, is followed by ‘The War of the Second Coalition’, then the war of the third collation, fourth coalition, fifth coalition, and then more wars, because why not?

What we’re interested in is the period immediately after ‘The War of the First Coalition’. The eponymous ‘coalition’ were the countries that opposed France. But the word ‘coalition’ possibly overemphasises the level of organisation and coordination that was going on. The period of ‘The War of the First coalition’ ends because the coalition collapses – which is different from ‘because everyone decides to stop doing war’ or ‘because they surrendered’. France does manage to reach various peace agreements with most countries involved, except Britain. And everything is unstable enough that the situation with some of the other countries might blow up again at any time.

And the Directory kind of has a vested interest in keeping the French military deployed in places that are Not Near Them. because otherwise the revolution might take on the flavour of a military coup. The Directory wanted the French armies and generals away fighting other people and not lurking around in Paris with nothing to do but muse about whether they thought the Directory was doing a satisfactory job or not.

And to at least one general – one quite popular general called Napoleon Bonaparte – it seemed pretty obvious that if they didn’t take care of Britain now, they were going to be an even bigger problem further down the line. Which is why at the start of 1798 the Directory say to him: ‘okay here’s a bunch of men go invade Great Britain.’ Then, having reviewed the situation, Napoleon turns around and says to the Directory: ‘How about we go to Egypt instead?’ And the Directory said ‘… Sure. Okay. Fine. Off you go.’

There are a whooole range of reasons why this idea was agreed upon. Including, but not limited to, the fact that certain European countries at this time just really like colonising places, regardless of who already lived there. Empires are in fashion. France had had an interest in Egypt for quite a while – this was not the first time someone had suggested they go there. And Napoleon in particular had an interest with it – he’d read lots of accounts of the area, and possibly saw going there and conquering the place as a way to emulate Alexander the Great. Which was kinda’ a giant red flag with regards to his future plans and ambitions.

They also thought that it would help give them control of certain trade routes, and there was also a possibility that, if France controlled Egypt, they would be able to find and re-establish some ancient canals that would connect the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Which would mean that ships would no longer have to go round the horn of Africa in order to ship goods between Asia and Europe. Super useful. Going to Egypt would also be way cheaper than trying to invade Great Britain; it could also potentially allow the French to get cosy with some anti-British elements in India, which Britain was currently occupying. And on top of all that, as I said before, the Directory was really rather in favour of keeping the military busy elsewhere, and not watching them blunder around trying to run France.

So they start making plans, and as part of those plans, they put out a call to recruit… savants. Napoleon put out a call for leading intellectuals to come and join him on a mission to somewhere. The destination was kept secret – they didn’t want the British to find out where they were going. And 151 artists, botanists, engineers, naturalists, astronomers, and even a poet and a musicologist packed up their bags and signed up to set sail on ships without knowing where they were going, or what they’d be exploring.

In the grand scheme of things, invading Egypt can’t really be called a success. Napoleon did take Alexandria, and Cairo… and then Nelson sort of decimated his ships at the battle of the Nile, cutting Napoleon’s army off from supplies. Napoleon arrives in Egypt on the 1st of July 1798. By the end of August 1799 he had departed to head back to France where he would go on to overthrow the Directory and then decide that maybe he should be Emperor.

But his team of savants (sans two close friends who left with him), along with basically everyone else, stayed behind. They wasted no time when they arrived and began documenting what they saw. Archaeology didn’t exist as a discipline at this time, so they set about documenting what they saw in the manner that made sense to them based on their respective disciplines.

They spent three years in Egypt documenting everything they could. But in 1801 the savants – minus the 31 of them who died in Egypt – and the remaining soldiers that hadn’t died through heatstroke, war or disease, made like Napoleon and buggered off back to France. And there, over the next seventeen years, they produced their magnum opus: La Description de l’Egypte - The Description of Egypt. Across 23 volumes they shared what they had learned – describing and illustrating buildings, peoples, plants, animals, insects, technology, and more.

This sprawling work became incredibly popular in western Europe. It kickstarted Egyptomania, and suddenly lots of people – and institutions – were interested in learning about Egypt, exploring it, and, of course, looting it. Y’know. For science.

So that’s the historical context necessary to understand the huge western-European interest in Egypt in the first few decades of the 19th century. And having covered that, we can now turn one of the real main characters of this story: Jean d’Anastasy. When I started writing this I discovered that it was ludicrously difficult to figure out who this guy was, for various reasons. In part this was because every biography of him I could find cited primary sources or other works that I couldn’t access to check that they really did say what the sources I could access claimed they say, which was a problem because most of the sources I could access disagreed with each other about a lot of details, as, it seems, did the primary sources they were citing. Like, for instance: when he was born, how exactly to spell his name, where he was born, his nationality, and when he died.

I have deleted so many paragraphs of stuff like ‘okay well this source says this and there’s this other guy with a similar name but I can’t tell if it’s him (it wasn’t. there’s genuinely another guy with the same name who was a Greek excavator active around the same period) and there’s other sources referring to someone as Giovanni and I think that might also be him, too, so like, what is going on, here?’ (what’s going on was the habit of certain people in the 19th century to use different forms of a name depending on the language being used. Jean, Giovanni, Ἰωάννης. Same guy).

Luckily after a bit of digging I did find a guy, Korshi Dosoo (doe-zoo), who had waded through a lot of this muck already, so I’m mostly going on what he’s decided because I’m pretty sure he spent more time researching him in order to write a couple of sentences and a couple of very extensive footnotes about d’Anastasy than I have for this entire episode.

Anyway. He was Greek (Bierbrier 2012: 19; Dosoo 2014: 25). His name was Ἰωάννης Ἀναστασίου, but later in life he started using a French-ified version of the name: Jean d’Anastasy. Since that’s what he seems to have chosen to go by, that’s what I’ll use. According to Who’s who in Egyptology, Jean’s family came from Damascus, where his father, a merchant, owned a company (Bierbrier 2012: 19); according to Dosoo’s research the family was from Macedonia (2014: 25). The date of their arrival in Egypt is uncertain, but he was in Egypt around 1801 with his father because his business model was built around catering to the French army. Which meant that the evacuation of the French troops in 1801 was rather bad for business. Also not great for business is when the owner of the company dies. Which is what Jean’s father did around this time. (Bierbrier 2012: 19). But evidently Jean had learned enough of running a successful business before his father died, because by 1825 he’d managed to not only pay off his father’s creditors and rebuild the business, but also become one of the most influential merchants in Alexandria, with considerable reputation and a favourable acquaintance with the wali or governor, Muhammad Ali, who had been appointed by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire after the French and British withdrew, leaving a large mess in their wake as they are wont to do (Fahmy 1998: 139-140).

It is, in all likelihood, because of his very successful business endeavours, that in 1828 he was appointed as the Consul-General in Egypt to the Kingdoms of Norway and Sweden (Dosoo: 2014: 26). Why Sweden and Norway? Dosoo suspects it was to do with what exactly was being traded and with whom. D’Anastasy apparently had a monopoly on grain, which Sweden wanted, and traded iron for it (Dosoo 1014: 26).

So what’s Jean d’Anastasy got to do with the Greek Magical Papyri? Well. The newfound European interest in all things Egyptian thanks to the works of Napoleon’s savants meant that people weren’t just content to visit Egypt, or read about it, but needed bits of it in their homes and museums, and d’Anastasy was very well placed to fulfil this desire. It does seem like he was also a collector of antiquities himself, but he was also a merchant and was also definitely acquiring things to sell to others.

Now, there’s a few details here that I did not get around to sussing out. I do not know whether he did any excavating himself. We know that he definitely employed other people to do such work for him. We even know some of their names. One of them, working in upper Egypt, was a man called Piccinini (Dawson 1949: 159). Another was an American who’d settled in Egypt called Francis Barthow (Vivien 2012: 6). And we know he purchased stuff from native Egyptians, who at the time did not need permits to excavate (Dosoo 2014:26). However, I get the impression that other people did need permits to excavate, based on a letter from someone in 1828 complaining about his difficulty in obtaining a permit, which apparently d’Anastasy and another guy had, and which they handed over to him (Dosoo: 2014: 26 fn. 11). So even if d’Anastasy wasn’t doing any excavation himself, he had people doing it for him, with permits he had acquired. He was also buying stuff off the locals.

And some of the things that d’Anastasy bought were papyri. At some point he was offered a collection of papyri that, he was told, had come from Thebes. And he bought them. The papyri were not, however, sold together. They were split up over three different sales and ended up in several different countries. Some ended up at the British Museum in London, others at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Louvre Paris, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin ended up with some, as did the Rijksmuseum in Leiden, Belgium (which is the one with the Eighth Book of Moses, by the way). He also donated some of the items in his collections to various places (Dosoo 2014: 27).

Despite coughing up money to own these papyri, scholars and curators didn’t care much about them for quite a while. To begin with, for a couple of decades, most of the papyri basically sat in their respective museum collections simply as curiosities, of interest only to a few scholars (Betz 1986: xliii).

Over the next couple of decades, the papyri were published by various scholars – individual journal articles discussing individual papyri and their contents, with translations into various languages. But they were still very specialised interests. Magic, though way more commonly studied now, is still not the most mainstream of topics when it comes to history, and at the start of the 1900s it was generally actively eschewed. Magic and its role in society and culture throughout the centuries was just not seen as a topic fit for study. And when it came to antiquity and ancient Greece in particular, an element of this was absolutely to do with the fact that Western scholars were deeply invested in the idea of Ancient Greece as… civilised, and civilising. As lofty and noble – the inventors of science and rationality. And some people still are invested in that idea. But that’s a whole other bag of problems.

The idea of ancient Greeks doing magic was just not what people wanted to know about. A famous classicist – famous within classics, at least – Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff wrote that he had ‘once heard an eminent scholar lament that that these papyri had been found, because they deprive antiquity of the noble lustre of classicism.’ Yeesh. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, at least, had the right idea – he finished his comment by saying he was quite please they’d been found, since he wanted to understand the ancient Greeks, not admire them (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1902: 254-55). This is exactly the same issues as we encountered with curse tablets back in episode seven. Academics were more interested in thinking of Greece and Roman as centres for philosophy and rationality and did not want to consider the idea that this kind of “irrational” thing could have been popular (Gager 1999: 3)

In 1905 Albrecht Dietrich, a German classicist specialising in Greek religion began teaching a seminar on the magical papyri, and following on from that, began to prepare a volume that would bring all of the magical papyri together (Betz 1986: xliii). He died in 1908 before completing the work, and it was taken up by others. By the time World War I happened, the material relating to the papyri that we refer to now as PGM I – IV were nearly ready. But… then World War I happened. Most of the editors who’d picked the project up were killed during the war (Betz 1986: xliv).

The publishing company, however, didn’t want the project to die so they enlisted the help of another scholar, Karl Preisendanz to finish it. Together with some other scholars they finally got volumes one and two finished. The first was published in 1928, the second in 1931. But the whole time they’d been working on these volumes, other papyri were being looted, and sometimes published. More papyri ended up in different museums across Europe and America. By the time World War II happened, therefore, they were planning a third volume to incorporate the new material. But… then World War II happened, and the Publishing House blew up. It was bombed on the 4th of September 1943. So that sort of brought things to a halt for a while.

Preisendanz died in 1968, and his death prompted the publication of a new, revised edition of the Greek Magical Papryi edited by Albert Henrichs. In 1986 Chicago University Press published their own edition of The Greek Magical Papyri, edited by Hans Dieter Betz. This one included English translations of the papyri and commentary, whereas the previous editions had only had the Greek text, maybe a commentary, but mostly just the apparatus criticus. It also included some other things that Preisendanz hadn’t bothered with…

Y’see, quite a few of the papyri weren’t just Greek magical papyri. They were bilingual - they were written in Greek and several Egyptian scripts. And Preisendanz was apparently so disinterested in the material written in Egyptian scripts that even when it occurred on the same papyri as the Greek material he just ignored it. Which is just kinda staggering, to me. Surely it’s pretty obvious that removing half the content will have impact on how we understand – and even translate – the texts, and make it harder to gain insight in to what kind of person wrote or used these texts? Why would you do that? It would be one thing if the content of the texts were the same – if the Greek and Demotic texts actually matched up (I mean, it would still be a problem, but a smaller one) but they don’t. It’s literally different material. He just straight up missed out half of the unique material in the texts because he couldn’t be bothered with Egyptian.

Since the initial compilation of the papyri which were labelled as the Papyri Graecae Magicae more ‘magical’ texts have been found. They’re catalogued in different ways, with a different numbering system, and don’t get added to the PGM. And like, I could literally do an episode on a whole bunch of magical texts that researchers now believe belonged to certain ‘archives’. But instead I’m just going to focus on a particular group of papyri, which all came from the collections of d’Anastasy, and which are now known as ‘The Theban Magical Library’.

It is almost certainly the case that we do not have everything that belonged to the Theban Magical Library, and the parts of it that are lost may well have contained other, non-magical material, as is the case in several other instances of magical archives (Dosoo & Torallas Tovar 2022: 8). But the fact that what we do have is in as good a condition as it, is a very good indication that they were deliberately stored (Dosoo & Torallas Tovar 2022: 13).

Before we go any further I just wanna clarify exactly how long some of these texts are, because I have no idea what you think of when I say ‘papyrus’. Some of these things are big. There are two different types of document format in the collection. Rolls and codices. Codices are in the range of what you might think of as ‘page size’ – for instance, PGM IV (= GEMF 57) is around 30cm high and 10 cm wide. PGM XIII (GEMF = 60) is around 27cm high and 16cm wide – a bit smaller than an A4 page. Rolls, however, are notably bigger. The largest in the collection is PGM XIV (= GEMF 16), a roll which is 500 cm long, and 25 cm high. It has over 108 recipes in it for various purposes. But even our smaller codex – PGM IV, with its measly 30x10 size, contains 53 spells. That’s not bad in terms of bang for your buck.

The Theban Magical Library is written in two languages (Greek and Egyptian) and uses four different scripts – Greek, and Demotic, hieratic, and Coptic (Dosoo 2014 : 84).

Hieratic is the oldest of the three Egyptian scripts used. Like, old old. Like, 2,000 years older than the 6th century BCE old. Hieratic is kinda’ what you get when you want to write hieroglyphics but fast. You wouldn’t necessarily look at something written in hieratic and think ‘ah yes, this writing system is very clearly related to hieroglyphics’, but then again, I’ve have read some letters recently that I wouldn’t have known were written in a Latin alphabet unless someone told me. And I think if someone pointed it out to you, you’d probably start to see it. It was used for official documents, legal stuff, accounting, etc. but also got used for things such as religious, literary, magical, medical, and mathematical texts.

Demotic is what mostly took over from hieratic, eventually, though hieratic continued to be used by the priestly class for their literature until the start of the second century CE (Wente 2001: 210). The earliest evidence for the use of Demotic is from around the mid seventh century BCE (Johnson 2001: 210). It starts to creep into the documents that hieratic had been used for, phraseology, formatting, spellings, and by the early 5th century BCE it had replaced Hieratic as the script for formal documents. Legal stuff like divorce contracts, inheritance, transfers of property; economic stuff, including sales receipts, loans, land leases, tax documents; and administrative documents like temple inventories, were all written in Demotic (Johnson 2001: 211-22). Later it also becomes the script used for literary texts. You then also find demotic used for private letters and even graffiti.

In 305 BCE Ptolemy takes over Egypt when Alexander the Great (who is such a boring figure and no one cares about him) dies and his empire gets split up. Ptolemy is from Macedonia. He speaks Greek. Throughout the reign of the Ptolemies Egyptians are encouraged to use Greek for official stuff. They still allowed documents to be written in Demotic, but there were incentives to produce them in Greek (Johnson 2001: 213). When Egypt became part of the Roman Empire in 30 BCE, however, that changed, and only Greek was acceptable (Johnson 2001: 213). But Demotic still got used elsewhere. People were still writing letters in Demotic, using Demotic for graffiti, in literary texts, etc. It just wasn’t being used for official documents.

Old Coptic emerged – at the latest – in the 1st Century CE. It’s what happens when you’re trying to transliterate Egyptian scripts into Greek. You’re using some Greek letters, but there are sounds in Egyptian that there aren’t letters for in Greek, so when that happens you throw in a demotic character instead.

The earliest texts in the Theban Magical Library can be broken down into two groups. They’re from the 2nd to 3rd centuries CE. PDM+PGM 12 (=GEMF 15), PDM+PGM 14 (=GEMF 16) and PDM Supplementum (= GEMF 17) (Dosoo & Torallas Tovar 2022: 12) are the first group. They all contain both Greek and Demotic writing (Dosoo & Torallas Tovar 2022: 12) and they all use the same cypher alphabet which, so far, is an alphabet unique to these rolls (Dosoo 2016: 259). This alphabet would be easy to solve by someone who knew Egyptian, but not by someone who knew only Greek. (Johnson 1986: lv). PDM Supplementum also contains hieratic and Old Coptic, and PGM 14 contains Old Coptic.
The second group from that same time period contain only Greek. That’s PGM 1 (=GEMF 31) and PGM 2 + PGM 6 (= GEMF 30). PGM 2 and PGM 6 were actually originally part of the same roll, but, as in other instances, the roll got split into two by someone, and the two halves ended up in different places. In this case PGM 2 ended up in Berlin and PGM 6 ended up in London. The PGM 2 plus 6 combo is just Greek, but PGM 1 contains Greek and a tiny bit of Greek written in an Egyptian script that’s either Demotic or Old Coptic. The next two groups are both from the to 4th century CE. The first contains PGM 5a + P. Holmiensis (=GEMF 59), PGM 13 (=GEMF 60), and P.Leiden I. 397. These are all magico-alchemical codices. The second group is PGM 4 (=GEMF 57) and 5 (= GEMF 58), which are just magical codices. PGM 4 uses Greek and Old Coptic, but the others in this group just use Greek.

These date ranges mean that this archive did not just belong to one person. It was passed down between several people from generations, and new material was added to it over time. But why have I just given all this detail about the different scripts and which ones were used in the various papyri?

Because it gives us hints about who was using these documents.

Ancient Egyptian education systems are not something I knew anything about until I started writing this and I still know very little, but the ruling elite had a lot of control over education (I know, what a strange and alien idea), and the priests were part of that class, which means they had a good say in it, too. Priests had lot of influence in running the schools where you would learn about science, maths, medicine, astronomy/astrology (not a clear distinction at the time), which from my understanding were run either at temples or at royal dwellings because of course the royal kids are going to get a good education. You also have specific schools for training to be priests or scribes. But there’s generational learning, too. If you can read and write then you’re going to pass that knowledge on to your son. So scribes come from this religious, or highly religiously-influenced context, but that doesn’t mean they would work in a specifically religious genre. There’s admin to be done. Legal documents, taxes, divorce documents, land holdings, unpaid labour schedules etc. all need written documentation. Your scribes form a notable part of your civil service.

All of which is to say that if you’ve learned to read and write hieroglyphs and hieratic and demotic, you’ve been trained in a context that’s highly influence by the priestly class. It also means that, should someone happen to need a written document, you might be able to make some money on the side. Perhaps also if they happened to need a document to be read.

The presence of Demotic in the Library indicates that, at the very least, those parts of the documents had to be written by someone who had trained as a scribe, and that, in all likelihood, means they were trained at a temple school, or by a priest individually, or by a father who had trained in such a place (Dosoo 2014 :121). And obviously that also means that, at the very least, those parts of the text were intended for use by such people – they’re the ones who can understand it.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that they were people whose first language was Egyptian and who had learned Greek as part of their training. In fact, based on technical details we won’t get into, Dosoo thinks that it’s probably the case that the authors and users of the Library were people whose first language was Greek and who had perfected their Egyptian through training at Egyptian scribal schools (Dosoo 2014: 122)

Of course, you can’t rule out the possibility that someone who could only read Greek – and therefore would have no training in Egyptian priestly environments – would still have some reverence for the documents written in scripts and a language they couldn’t read, but which they considered powerfully mystical, and would thus keep them despite not being able to use them (Dosoo 2014: 114). That’s just the way people are.

Something that could potentially give us more clues as to the possible writers and users of the library is knowing where it was found. But because of how they were excavated and collected we don’t have that information. But we do have theories!

We will certainly, at some point, discuss the destruction of magical texts under Roman rule, but that is an episode in itself. It was a thing that happened, and it was a thing that happened with increasing frequency and with increasingly severe consequences for those who were discovered to have magical texts. And the increase in frequency and severity does tie in with the end of expansion of the library. The last texts added to it are from the 4th century CE, and that is also when persecution relating to magical practices increased. (Dosoo & Torallas Tovar 2022: 16). However the ‘anti-magic laws’ theory isn’t currently the most favoured by researchers of this topic. Whilst the expansion of the Theban Magical Library ends in the 4th century, that’s not the case for the production of magical texts overall. What happens is a decline in texts written in Greek and an increase in texts written in Coptic (Dosoo & Torallas Tovar 2022: 16). Furthermore, laws written in Rome weren’t always enforced particularly vigorously in other parts of the empire (Dosoo & Torallas Tovar 2022: 16).

So what about the second option – buried to conceal magical secrets? Sometimes you have a secret club and you don’t want people who aren’t in your secret club to see your secret club stuff. And you might be able to support this position with excerpts from the texts themselves. Take our 8th book of Moses. There’s an instruction in the text telling the owner – now an initiate of some sort having completed a ritual to destroy the text:

The initiation called The Monad has been fully declared to you, child./ Now I wish to subjoin for you, child, also the practical uses of this sacred book, the things which all the experts accomplish with this sacred and blessed book. As I made you swear, child, in the temple of Jerusalem, when you have been filled with the divine wisdom, dispose of this book so that it will not be found’. (PGM XIII 230-34)

So there’s a spell in the Theban Magical Library that literally tells the owner to make sure the book won’t be found once they’re done with it. Just to be clear here: this is not a Jewish spell and that is absolutely not a thing that happened in the temple of Jerusalem. It’s not anything to do with ancient Jewish magic, it’s what other people thought Jewish magic would be like (Dosoo & Torallas Tovar 2022: 18) and is there to give this thing a +2 cool bonus. And basically, the instruction about making sure the book won’t be found is about making sure the uninitiated don’t get to see it. But at some point you have to give it to someone to use in order to become initiated. So… why not just pass it on to the next person who you want to let be initiated? And it could also just be another way of making it seem cooler. Or, y’know, maybe they did take it seriously but didn’t want to actually destroy the text because humans like to preserve cool things (Dosoo & Torallas Tovar 2022: 18).

Of course, not all of the texts in the Theban Magical Library contain an exhortation to keep the contents secret, but if the element of secrecy is enhancing the vibe of the magical-ness then wanting to keep them all secret make sense.

The third option is that they were part of a funerary offering, and as I said before, this could be combined with either of the other two options so far. Putting things in tombs is a great way to hide them. Funerary texts range from things that had a practical purpose in terms of aiding the deceased in some way, to things that… aren’t for that purpose.

The most famous, or infamous, funerary text is ‘The Book of the Dead’. Which maybe I’ll do an episode on at some point but not now. The Book of the Dead is a recent construct. No one in ancient Egypt was writing a thing that they would point at and say ‘yeah, that’s The book of the dead’. The term ‘book of the dead’ – or Totenbuch - came from a German archaeologist – Karl Richard Lepsius in 1842 when he published a book called Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter nach dem hieroglyphischen Papyrus in Turin. i.e. The Book of the Dead of the Egyptians from the hieroglyphic papyrus in Turin’ (Tutty 2018: 302 fn. 54) That is where that name comes from.

The Book of the Dead is a text that was thought to be helpful to the deceased. It contained spells, hymns, threats to gods – things that someone thought would be useful for the dead person to have so that they could use it to help them get to the afterlife successfully. So that’s a funerary text with an obviously practical purpose. On the other hand there are texts that are found in tombs or graves that were clearly placed there deliberately, but not because someone thought that the dead person would need them to enter the afterlife.

During an excavation of a Roman cemetery in Hawara, dated to between 100 and 250 CE graves were discovered in which there were not just texts but pottery, toys, and trinkets (Tutty 2018: 313). It is certainly harder to argue that a toy was placed there as something necessary for entering the afterlife. In the grave of one woman, lying under her head, was a large papyrus scroll from around the second century CE. On it were the first two books of the ancient Greek epic The Iliad (Tutty 2018: 313). Books one and two contain such highlights as Agamemnon being forced to return an enslaved woman he had taken as prize to her father because the god Apollo sent a plague upon the Greek army, Agamemnon then sulking and taking the enslaved woman who had been awarded to Achilles as recompense, Achilles then also sulking, the entire army nearly leaving Troy because Agamemnon tried to test their loyalty and it backfired catastrophically, and a very long list of all the generals at Troy and how many ships they all brought.

Whatever the reason for it being placed in the grave was, it is highly unlikely that anyone thought this text was going to help the woman enter the afterlife. So if our Theban Magical Library was placed in a tomb as a funerary offering, there is no reason to suppose that it was placed there because of a belief that its contents would specifically help the deceased enter the afterlife. Does it have more overt religious overtones than the first two books of the Iliad? Sure. Does it contain any spells clearly meant to aid the deceased like the Book of the Dead has? No.

A final caveat for the ‘funerary texts’ theory is that in nearly all cases the texts found in graves are single manuscripts. If this were a funerary offering it would be by far the biggest ever found in terms of texts (Dosoo & Torallas Tovar 2022: 19).

So what about the fourth option – these scrolls are the remains of a temple library? Temples collected books. They had libraries. These are things we know. And in favour of this theory you might want to count what we know about the type of scribes who would have been able to write and used these documents. However. Firstly, there is a limit to which parts of the Library can confidently be claimed to have been written by a scribe trained in a priestly, or general temple, tradition. Remember, it’s not the case that all of the manuscripts are bilingual. Some of them only contain Greek. Those don’t require an author or user from that context. Secondly: we have literary evidence of people not at all associated with that temple context practicing magic (Dosoo and Torallas Tovar 2022: 22).

Thirdly: So far, there’s actually little evidence of the types of magical practices represented in the Library actually being used at temples (Dosoo and Torallas Tovar 2022: 22). And we can add to that the fact that there are literary descriptions of the contents of temple libraries and they don’t include lists of obviously magical texts. (Dosoo and Torallas Tovar 2022: 22). None of that rules out the possibility of these texts being from a temple library, of course, but it does mean that it’s not the overwhelmingly obvious answer that it might at first seem to be.

So those are the main theories as to where the Theban Magical Library was found, and why it might have survived: hidden from the authorities, hidden from the uninitiated, left as a funerary offering, or came from a temple library.

So now we get to the big question: what, exactly, is in this library. Normally I try to keep my scripts under 9,000 words, which means I have around 2,000 words to try and fit this in. And you know what? I tried. I tried and I failed. So instead of having one very long episode, this one will be a bit… whatever length it turns out being, and then the next one will also be of an as of yet unknown length, just about the contents of the Theban Magical Library and then the episode after that we will talk about the Eighth Book of Moses. The good news is that the next episode is already half written so I might actually get it finished in a timely manner.

So thanks for listening. If you like the show, please subscribe on whatever podcatcher you’re using. Rate and review the show, especially on Apple Podcasts.

If you have questions, comments, corrections, feedback, want to suggest a topic, etc. You can find the podcast on twitter: @poisonroompod
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Transcripts of all episodes are available at poisonroom.com, where you can also see the references and bibliography. As always if the sources are publicly available, they’re linked to.

You have been listening to The Poison Room. The voice in your ears was not trained in a priestly context.




__Bibliography__

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--- (2009) ‘The Greco-Roman Magical Papyri’ in Frankfurter, D. (Ed.) Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic Pp. 283-321, Brill.

Dosoo, K. (2014) Rituals of Apparition in the Theban Magical Library, Unpublished doctoral thesis.

--- (2016) ‘A History of the Theban Magical Library’ Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 53: 251-274.

Dosoo, K. & Torallas Tovar, S. (2022) ‘Anatomy of the Magical Archive’ in Faraone, C., & Torallas Tovar, S. (Eds) The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books, and Individual Recipes, Pp. 3-63, University of Michigan Press.

Faraone, C. A. & Torallas Tovar, S. (Eds) (2022) Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies: Text and Translation, Vol. 1.

Fahmy, K. (1998) ‘The era of Muhammad ‘Ali Pash, 1805-1848’ in The Cambridge History of Egypt Vol. 2 Pp. 139-179.

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Johnson, J. H. (1986) ‘Introduction to the Demotic Magical Papyri’ in The Greek Magical Papyri, Betz, H. D. (Ed.) University of Chicago Press.

--- (2001) ‘Demotic’, in Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt - Volume 3, Mirza U. (Ed.), Oxford University Press. Pp 210-214.

Love, E. (2019) ‘An Introduction to Old Coptic’ Coptic Magical Papyri Blog

Preisendanz, K. & Henrichs, A. (1973) Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die griechischen Zauberpapyri, Bd. I., Teubner B.G.

Tutty, P., (2018) ‘Books of the Dead or Books with the Dead: Interpreting Book Depositions in Late Antique Egypt.’ In The Nag Hammadi Codices and Late Antique Egypt, Lundhaug, H. & Jenott, L. (Eds) 287–326. Mohr Siebeck.

Vivien, C. (2012) Americans in Egypt, 1770-1915: Explorers, Consuls, Travelers, Soldiers, Missionaries, Writers and Scientists, McFarland & Company.

Wente, E. G. (2001) ‘Hieratic’, Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt - Volume 3, Mirza U. (Ed.), Oxford University Press. Pp 206-210.

Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. (1902) Reden und Vorträge, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.


Databases

Korshi Dosoo, Edward O.D. Love & Markéta Preininger (chief editors) Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects