Textual Amulets of the Mediterranean World: 1000 BCE-1000 CE
Textual Amulets of the Mediterranean World: 1000 BCE-1000 CE
An international group of scholars will produce a corpus of translations of the most important and best-preserved textual amulets of the Mediterranean, as well as drawings and recipes for them. The team plans to arrange the corpus chronologically so that historical trends can be easily traced.
For over two thousand years, people in pre-modern cultures wore objects on their bodies as amulets, initially things they found in the natural world, and then man-made items, eventually carrying a protective text. The last-named, which we will refer to as “textual amulets,” appear in different languages and cultures: Egyptian, Greek, and Latin, Semitic languages, etc, which have been generally studied in isolation. There is increasing interest in comparing these traditions and exploring their ties and interferences. Our project aims to assemble a team to produce a selective corpus of translations of the most important and best-preserved textual amulets of the Mediterranean, as well as drawings and recipes for them. We plan to arrange the corpus of textual amulets chronologically so that historical trends can be easily traced, and, where enough evidence survives, also by genre and region within these historical periods.