The Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection of Babylonian Antiquities at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena houses one of the major European collections of incantation bowls. Forty bowls bear texts written in the Jewish, Manichaean Syriac or Mandaic scripts, and most of the rest (some twenty-five objects) in the Pahlavi script or in various pseudoscripts. The present volume comprises new editions of the Aramaic (and Hebrew) bowl texts based on high-resolution photographs taken by the authors, together with brief descriptions and photographs of the remaining material. New readings are often supported with close-up photographs. The volume is intended to serve as a basis for further study of magic in late Antiquity and of the Late Eastern Aramaic dialects in which the texts were composed.

The corpus of Aramaic incantation bowls from Sasanian Mesopotamia is perhaps the most important source we have for studying the everyday beliefs and practices of the Jewish, Christian, Mandaean, Manichaean, Zoroastrian and Pagan communities on the eve of the Islamic conquests. The bowls are from the Schøyen Collection, which has some 650 texts in different varieties of Aramaic: Jewish Aramaic, Mandaic and Syriac, and forms the largest collection of its kind anywhere in the world. This volume presents editions of sixty-four Jewish Aramaic incantation bowls, with accompanying introductions, translations, philological notes, photographs and indices. The themes covered include the magical divorce and the accounts of the wonder-working sages Ḥanina ben Dosa and Joshua bar Peraḥia. It is the first of a multi-volume project that aims to publish the entire Schøyen Collection of Aramaic incantation bowls.

The Aramaic incantation bowls from Sasanian Mesopotamia are the most important source we have for studying the everyday beliefs of the Jewish, Christian, Mandaean, Manichaean, Zoroastrian and Pagan communities on the eve of the Islamic conquests. In A Corpus of Syriac Incantation Bowls, Marco Moriggi presents new editions of forty-nine Syriac incantation bowls that were originally published between 1853 and 2012, with accompanying introductions, translations, philological notes, photographs and glossaries. Furthermore, there is a detailed analysis of the Estrangela and Manichaean scripts as used on the bowls, together with newly drawn script charts. In gathering, organising and updating most of the published Syriac bowls, this book provides a valuable resource for further research into both their language and content. "This volume is a significant contribution to the study of the Syriac incantation bowls, and it should be of great interest to scholars of ‘magic’ in Late Antiquity as well as to those working in Syriac language, literature, and history, since the Syriac incantation bowls are a fascinating—yet often neglected—component of the broader Syriac heritage." - Aaron M. Butts, Catholic University of America,Washington D.C., in: JNES (October 2015) "Moriggi’s new book will no doubt become an essential reference work for all interested in Syriac magical texts from late-antiquity. It is also an important contribution not only to our knowledge of the language of the Syriac incantation bowls, but to the whole field of Babylonian Aramaic (JBA and Mandaic)....Scholars of Aramaic are indebted to Moriggi for making this valuable and rewarding collection available. It is certain to stimulate further interest and discussion in the field." - Ohad Abudraham, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel, in: Orientalia (2015) "The volume certainly makes an enormous contribution to furthering studies on Syriac incantation texts, and more generally on incantation bowls. For any scholar who has an interest in incantation bowls, this work is a ‘mustʼ" - Erica C. D. Hunter, SOAS University of London, in: Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 113.1 (2018)

The study of the Syriac magical traditions has largely been marginalised within Syriac studies, with the earliest treatments displaying a disparaging attitude towards both the culture and its magical practices. Despite significant progress in more recent scholarship in respect of the culture, its magical practices and their associated literatures remain on the margins of the scholarly imagination. This volume aims to open a discussion on the history of the field, to evaluate how things have progressed, and to suggest a fruitful way forward. In doing so, this volume demonstrates the incredible riches contained within the Syriac magical traditions, and the necessity of their study.

This is the ninth volume of Babel und Bibel, an annual of ancient Near Eastern, Old Testament, and Semitic studies. The principal goal of the annual is to reveal the inherent relationship between Assyriology, Semitics, and biblical studies—a relationship that our predecessors comprehended and fruitfully explored but that is often neglected today. The title Babel und Bibel is intended to point to the possibility of fruitful collaboration among the three disciplines, in an effort to explore the various civilizations of the ancient Near East. This volume includes as a major portion of its contents selected papers from the 6th Biannual Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Semitics.

The Achaemenid period (550-330 BCE) is rightly seen as one of the most formative periods in Judaism. It is the period in which large portions of the Bible were edited and redacted and others were authored--yet no dedicated interdisciplinary study has been undertaken to present a consistent picture of this decisive time period. This book is dedicated to the study of the touchpoints between Yahwistic communities throughout the Achaemenid empire and the Iranian attributes of the empire that ruled over them for about two centuries. Its approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary. It brings together scholars of Achaemenid history, literature and religion, Iranian linguistics, historians of the Ancient Near East, archeologists, biblical scholars and Semiticists. The goal is to better understand the interchange of ideas, expressions and concepts as well as the experience of historical events between Yahwists and the empire that ruled over them for over two centuries. The book will open up a holisitic perspective on this important era to scholars of a wide variety of fields in the study of Judaism in the Ancient Near East.

The Bible in the Bowls represents a complete catalogue of Hebrew Bible quotations found in the published corpus of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls. As our only direct epigraphic witnesses to the Hebrew Bible from late antique Babylonia, the bowls are uniquely placed to contribute to research on the (oral) transmission of the biblical text in late antiquity; the pre-Masoretic Babylonian vocalisation tradition; the formation of the liturgy and the early development of the Jewish prayer book; the social locations of biblical knowledge in late antique Babylonia and socio-religious typologies of the bowls; and the dynamics of scriptural citation in ancient Jewish magic. In a number of cases, the bowls also contain the earliest attestations of biblical verses not found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Pre-dating the next available evidence by four to five centuries, the bowls are a valuable resource for biblical text critics. By making these valuable witnesses to the Hebrew Bible easily available to scholars, The Bible in the Bowls is designed to facilitate further research by linguists, liturgists, biblical text critics, and students of Jewish magic. It collates and transcribes each biblical verse as it appears in the published bowls, furnishes details of the bowls’ publication, and notes various features of interest. The catalogue is also accompanied by an accessible introduction that briefly introduces the incantation bowls, surveys their deployment of scripture in light of their magical goals, and discusses the orthography of the quotations and what this can tell us about the encounter with the biblical text in late antique Babylonia.