Présente les 151 psaumes de David utilisés comme incantations dans la magie copte.

This volume is the first in a new series of editions of Coptic-language "magical" manuscripts from Egypt, written on papyrus, ostraca, parchment, and paper, and dating to between the fourth and twelfth centuries CE. Their texts attest to non-institutional rituals intended to bring about changes in the lives of those who used them – heal disease, curse enemies, bring about love or hatred, or see into the future. These manuscripts represent rich sources of information on daily life and lived religion of Egypt in the last centuries of Roman rule and the first centuries after the Arab conquest, giving us glimpses of the hopes and fears of people of this time, their conflicts and problems, and their vision of the human and superhuman worlds. This volume presents 37 new editions and descriptions of manuscripts, focusing on formularies or "handbooks", those texts containing instructions for the performance of rituals. Each of these is accompanied by a history of its acquisition, a material description, and presented with facing text and translations, tracings of accompanying images, and explanatory notes to aid in understanding the text.

As magic is a powerful means to influence the natural world and human beings, and is deeply connected to the divine sphere, persons using it are in constant need to justify its use. The ambivalence of magic to serve both well-wishing and ill-wishing aims puts the practitioners ever at risk. This volume illuminates the strategies adopted to legitimise the practice of magic and analyses how these justifications are phrased and formulated in cuneiform texts, thereby revealing the underlying principles and unexplained axioms of using magic in the Ancient Near East.

A special connection with ancient Egypt drew Omm Sety to Egypt, where she studied with the great Egyptologists Selim Hassan and Ahmed Fakhry. For more than four decades she made her home in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza and in the mudbrick village surrounding the Temple of Sety I at Abydos. For her, there was no separation between ancient and modern Egypt. Pictures on tomb walls illustrated the games children played in the streets in front of her house. The texts she translated from the temple walls shed light on the origins of the social customs of her Egyptian neighbors. For another four decades this book, which deserves to be called Omm Sety's life work, remained hidden away. Now Nicole B. Hansen, an Egyptologist who specializes in connections between ancient and modern Egypt, brings this work to light in an annotated edition with extensive notes and bibliography, illustrated with Omm Sety's own drawings. It features a foreword by Kent R. Weeks, who rediscovered KV5 in the Valley of the Kings, and an introduction by Walter A. Fairservis, the late director of the Hierakonpolis Project. For Egyptologists, this book includes explanations of texts from the Pyramid Texts to Herodotus as well as ancient Egyptian art. For anthropologists, it represents the results of a lifetime of unbridled participant-observation, during which Omm Sety used folk treatments to cure her ills and agreed to serve as a medium for a spirit during a magic ritual. For those interested in Omm Sety herself, this book provides new insights into her life, the people she knew and the places she lived.

Essays on Semitics, Statistics and Linguistics, the Hebrew Bible, the Greek Bible, and Religion by an international group of scholars reflect the wide-ranging interests of Professor Andersen's research and writing. In addition, a number of poems by friends of Professor Andersen are included, in appreciation of his long-standing interest and involvement in poetics. The contributions reflect the deep impact of his leadership in linguistics and study of the Hebrew Bible.

E.A. Judge's third collection of essays moves on from Rome and the New Testament to the interaction of the classical and biblical traditions, to the cultural transformation of late antiquity, and to the contested heritage of Athens and Jerusalem in the modern West. A lifelong interest in Rome bridges this range. Christianity emerges as essentially a movement of ideas, opposed at first to the cultic practice of ancient religion which had been meant to secure the existing order of things. The new message with its demanding morality laid the foundations for our radically different sense of 'religion' as the quest for the ideal life.The 'Judge method' tackles such momentous questions by starting with textual detail, translated from Latin and Greek. Inspired by the project of the Dolger-Institut in Bonn (the interaction of antiquity and Christianity), he brings to it a particular focus on those documents of the times retrieved from stone or papyrus. The collection reflects the more holistic approach to history, starting with the ancient world, that has been developed at Macquarie University in Sydney, where diverse interests are now drawn together from as far back as ancient Egypt or China in an attractive approach to the modern world.