THE NINE WEIRDEST THINGS AT YALE include:

2. Greco-Roman-Egyptian Magical Amulets

Venture to the third floor of Sterling Memorial Library and you may stumble across a succession of small rooms that contain Yale’s Babylonian Collection, the biggest collection of Mesopotamian objects in the United States.

But in a dusty drawer at the back of an office crammed with cuneiform tablets and maps of Mesopotamia, one can find 74 Greco-Roman-Egyptian Magical amulets left to Yale in 2005 by Dr. James H. Schwartz, a neurobiologist at Columbia University who also had an interest in numinology. The amulets are small stones or pieces of metal inscribed with text written in Greek letters, although the letters rarely say anything in classical Greek.

For some indication of what the amulets mean and what their significance might be, I visit John C. Darnell, the chair of Yale’s Egyptology Department, in his office on the third floor of the Hall of Graduate Studies.

“Primarily these are words of magical power; these can be names of gods and they can also be things that to us seem like nonsense,” explains Darnell. “These sorts of gems and magical incantations on papyri are the origins of words like ‘Abracadabra.’”

The engravings on the amulets are of Greek, Hebrew and Egyptian gods and demigods. Hecate, the Greek goddess of witchcraft, is featured prominently on some stones while others depict Yahweh, the Hebrew god.

“What’s really interesting about them is that people in the Greco-Roman world are taking these names from all over the Eastern Mediterranean and using them on these magical gems,” says Darnell. “We know sort of how they were used because there are magical papyri in Greek and in Demotic and some of these texts make specific reference to what you did with these amulets.”

Darnell proceeds to read from a translation of a magical papyrus that he has on hand:

“Take a lodestone and on it have carved a three face Hecate and after the carving is done, clean with natron and water and dip it in the blood of one who has died a violent death, then make a food offering to it and say the spell at the time of the ritual.”

Also featured on the stones is Abrasax, the Eastern Mediterranean god of Magic who Darnell believes traces his origins from the Ancient Egyptians. He shows an image of the tomb of Rameses II and explains that the double snake motif of Abrasax and that depicted on the tomb are one and the same.

“These things have a very, very old Egyptian pedigree,” he says. “They basically create a kind of magical God for the worshippers who doesn’t really exist in specific religions. It is the attempt to make a pantheistic god who is made up of all the great gods you can imagine.”

But do these stones do anything?

Darnell smiles and explains that Egyptian medicine was based not only on magic, but also on medical praxis. So the stones and the medicine went together – the stones provided psychological assurance and the medicine physical treatment.

But one should still be careful when touching the stones — a student in Darnell’s 2007 seminar “Egypt and Northeast Africa: A multidisciplinary approach” said the students were told to “be careful what they thought of” while handling the gems.


8. Dura Europos remains

In 1920, during the Arab Revolt, a British soldier digging a trench in what is now Syria chanced upon set of wall paintings that were marvelously preserved. This was the first time since the fall of the fort of Dura Europos to the Sassanid Empire in 256 or 257 A.D. that anyone had seen the remains of what was once a mighty Roman stronghold.

Due to unrest in the region, it was not until 1928 that extensive archaeological excavations could begin. Teams sponsored by Yale and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres began to plunder the site and ship their findings back to Damascus, the United States and France. The excavations ended in 1937, by which time 12,000 pieces of clothing, weapons, wall paintings and other remains had found their way back to the Yale University Art Gallery.

Dura was an incredibly multicultural city and the findings certainly reflect that:

“It was a crossroads in the region — traders would go through, caravans would go through,” explains Lisa Brody ’91, the YUAG’s associate curator of ancient art. “What’s wonderful about the site for scholars is that it’s very well preserved, and that the archaeological remains reflect all of these different cultures interacting — especially, for example, the religions.”

The city of Dura had a Mithraic temple, an early Christian chapel and a synagogue, which were all sent back to Yale as complete as possible. Reconstructions of the whole Mithraic temple and Christian chapel’s baptistry were built in the 1980s and housed at the YUAG, but now the entirety of the collection is kept at an off-site storage facility in Hamden.

“We are in the process of evaluating the condition of the objects from the Dura excavation and beginning conservation treatment,” says Brody, who laments that students are not able to see the collection.

She said she hopes to organize a travelling exhibition of the objects starting in February 2011, before the space for the collection to be permanently housed and exhibited (including the reconstruction of the Mithraic temple, but not the baptistery, which will be digitally reconstructed) is completed in 2012.

Until then, interested parties can view the objects on ARTstor.com if they can’t charm their way into the off-site facility.

The other seven items are pretty interesting as well. Jack Sasson also flags 1. The Voynich Manuscript, 6. The Comparative Literature Library, and 9. Holy Land U.S.A. on the Agade list