Levene, Dan;
(2000)
Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity - A Corpus of Magic Bowls.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), University of London.
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Abstract
Since the first magic bowl text in Jewish Aramaic was edited by Thomas Ellis in 1859 there have only been just over 100 such texts published. Among the most significant contributors were James A. Montgomery, Cyrus Gordon, Edwin Yamauchi, Markham J. Geller, joined more recently by Tapani Harviainen, Christa Muller-Kessler as well as Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked. This dissertation includes text editions with critical apparatus for twenty hitherto unpublished magic bowl texts in Jewish Aramaic. The commentary contains philological analyses and comparison with other published and unpublished bowls, Jewish amulets from Late Antiquity, magical Geniza material, classic Jewish sources up to the medieval period, Hekhalot, and Jewish liturgy. Special features and differences between duplicate texts are discussed. A comprehensive glossary, lists of names, and photographs of the bowls are provided. The introduction includes a description of the bowls, a review of the main grammatical features of the Jewish Aramaic dialect of the bowls, a discussion of some other sources with which these texts share material and motifs and an analyses of the importance of duplicate texts. The limited number of bowl texts which are available for study means that many of the problems which have risen in the process of editing have remained unsolved. This new corpus includes a wide spectrum of material including rare curse texts, legal as well as liturgical formula, new lexical material and parallels to previously published texts which allow corrections and in some cases new readings. The occasional employment of other contemporary dialect forms as well as non-Jewish motifs expose the world of magical practice in Late Antiquity to have been fertile ground for cross cultural exchanges.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity - A Corpus of Magic Bowls |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This thesis has been digitised by the British Library's EThOS service. |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10179220 |
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