Friday, September 09, 2022

New project on the Penn Aramaic incantation bowls

ARAMAIC WATCH: The story the bowls tell (Penn Today).
In an ambitious new project, historian Simcha Gross and Harvard’s Rivka Elitzur-Leiman are studying hundreds of ancient incantation bowls housed at the Penn Museum. They hope to better understand the objects and eventually, build a database of all these bowls worldwide.
As the article notes, the corpus of nearly 300 Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls from Nippur is especially important because they were recovered in a scientific archaeological excavation.

James Montgomery's 1913 edition, mostly of the best preserved ones (about 15% of the corpus), is out of copyright and is available at the Internet Archive: Aramaic incantation texts from Nippur.

It is great that the remaining, more difficult, bowls in the corpus are now receiving attention.

For many PaleoJudaica posts on the ancient Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls, start here (cf. here and here) and follow the links.

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