Project overview
The main aim of this application is to get the chance to bring to completion a major research output that is the product of the work of a number of years. This output is a monograph in which the corpus of all known Jewish Aramaic magic bowl incantation curse texts will be assembled, presented in scientific editions and discussed at length.
These texts belong to the Jews of late antique (c. 4th -7th century CE) Mesopotamia, geographically known today as Iraq, who constituted a large minority within the Persian Empire; estimated by some to have been as large as one million. This period is significant as it marks the end of a time of development that precedes the rise of Islam. Amongst the most significant documentary heritage of this period are the literary productions of the Jews, namely the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. These highly stylised compilations of sources gathered over a period of hundreds of years received their final editing only in the early medieval period. The other great source the Jews of this period have left us are the Hebrew and Aramaic amulets. From the Roman west but a few have survived, from the Persian east, however, we have a wealth of incantation literature; these are the Jewish Aramaic magic bowl incantation texts to which the collection of curses my study is dedicated to belong.
The considerable impact these texts are having on the study of the late antique near east is only now beginning to be appreciated as the wealth of content found in them and their importance for linguistic research is being realised. The slow, but steady, accumulation of reliable editions of these texts has now reached a stage whereby the varieties of its content (religious, linguistic, historic, folkloric, etc) and importance to scholarship can no longer be ignored.
To date most of the scholastic effort in this area has been directed at producing reliable text editions; an arduous labour as these texts are often long and elaborate and are written in dialects and scripts that are very difficult to decipher and only partially known. The priority has been to provide access to scholars of late antique history, religion, Semitic philology and anthropology. Secondary studies of the material are still in their infancy and are few in number. It is a matter of urgency that the editing of these texts be supported as it is by far the richest Jewish Aramaic source of manuscripts for this period - as opposed to other material that has survived only in manuscripts that have been edited and redacted hundreds of years later (such as the Talmuds).
The Jewish Aramaic magic bowl incantation texts, of which over a thousand are known to exist, are apotropaic - reputed to have the power of averting evil influence or ill luck. The evil influences they purport to rebut are overwhelmingly of a supernatural nature, yet there are a minority of texts in which a human origin to these ills is identified by name; essentially curses. A monograph that will include a reliable edition of all the known texts of a sub genre such as these curses, accompanied by a discussion of them affords a rare opportunity to study a defined and manageable group of texts. For the greater corpus of the few hundreds of published texts are harder to cope with as a group in their totality at this early stage of their research.
An AHRC Fellowship Scheme would allow me to complete an important monograph which will be a significant contribution to scholarship. It would also afford me the opportunity to build on a growing public interest in my research by producing a number of other outcomes aimed at wider audiences. These will include a popular introduction to the subject to be published on the website of the Virtual Magic Bowl Archive, a contribution to a museum catalogue and a series of lectures on the topic.