Korshi Dosoo | Christian Egypt and its "Pagan" Past

When I was asked to give a paper here I decided to purposely keep the title a little bit vague to allow me the choice ultimately to talk about a number of different potential topics. One of the first things I thought of was this very interesting corpus of magical texts that we find from the 6th to 9th century or so in which we find the Egyptian deities Horus and Isis having these adventures in this text which I published with my colleague Lincoln Blumell a few years ago. Horus goes into hell, he meets a beautiful woman there, he falls in love with her, she doesn't fall in love with him and so he has to ask his mother Isis to create a love spell to make her fall in love with him. This is a very interesting genre of text that shows us that somehow stories about these gods continued to circulate in Egypt centuries after their last temples had closed. So I was thinking about talking about this but then I realised of course that the late great Robert Rittner would have given many talks here and I think he actually gave a talk about these very texts and so if you're interested in these I can answer questions about them later but instead I decided to talk about something a little bit different. This is about a text which you can see me reading here a few years ago in 2019. I was at a conference in Amsterdam and I escaped for an afternoon to the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden where I was looking, so you can see it's quite an unusual text, it's not papyrus. I'm not sure if you can tell what it is, I'll give you a few moments to try to guess what it is I'm looking at before I show you more clearly. It's a bone, so it's actually a rib cage of a large mammal of some kind. It was originally published I think in 1953 by the coptologist James Tresher and he thought it was maybe the rib of a camel and you can see it's written on both sides in this very strange handwriting in a very strangely coloured ink, it's actually a red ink and James Tresher suggested that it might actually be written in blood. Now when I looked at it to be honest it doesn't really look like blood, it's too light to be blood and blood of course when it dries it becomes quite flaky but nonetheless this red ink does kind of evoke blood in some way and of course we know that, well maybe you don't know, but those of us who work on magical text know that magical texts are sometimes supposed to be written in blood and so maybe this red colour somehow evokes the practice of writing with blood. Now what I noticed when I looked at it, it's a very interesting object of course and when you look at an object like this in person, even if you've studied it already, you're really struck by the physical details. So for example you can see the bone has cracked in certain places, you can see still the kind of marrow, the ribbing of the marrow inside and even there's little bits of gristle, bits of meat and sinew which you can see still sticking to it and so this was very striking when I saw it, you kind of get the impression this is taken very recently from an animal that's just been butchered perhaps. So I'm going to talk today about this object, I'm going to talk about it in a slightly roundabout way, I'm not going to tell you what it is yet. First though I thought I'd talk about where it comes from because this is a question which has become very important to us in the study of ancient artefacts, it's a question which our predecessors often didn't pose very often, they would publish texts or publish artefacts without telling us where they came from, but I think as you'll see in this case where it comes from is actually a very important part of the story. So today it's in the National Museum of Antiquities, this is in a small town in the Netherlands called Leiden, it's about an hour from Amsterdam and if you ever have the chance to go there I very much recommend it. It's a beautiful little town, they have canals, they actually have a temple there inside the museum, it's the Temple of Taffa from Upper Egypt, one of the temples which was submerged or would have been submerged by the construction of the high dam and so all the countries which contributed to the rescue of these temples got to keep one of the temples physically inside of it, it got taken apart brick by brick and then shipped all the way to the Netherlands. Of course there's another one in New York which you may have seen in the MMA. So this bone which I'm talking about today is in the Dutch Museum of Antiquities, but how did it get there? Well it was purchased from Johan Mooger who was a very well-known Dutch antiquities dealer, if you google him you'll find all kinds of collections which are owed to him, not simply from Egypt, not simply Egyptian material but also Far Eastern material all over the Netherlands and other parts of Europe. He in turn seems to have got it from Robert Naaman who was an antiquities dealer in Cairo in the middle of the 20th century, although you can see he died very young. So when James Drescher published this originally in 1953 he said that he found it in the shop of Robert Naaman in Cairo. Technically it probably didn't belong to Robert Naaman, at this time he was actually looking after the shop which had belonged to his father Maurice Naaman and he jointly owned the collection together with his sisters and we'll discuss that a tiny bit more later. Now Maurice Naaman was one of the most important people in the Egyptian antiquities trade. I did a very rough calculation last night and it turns out that something like five percent of all Coptic magical apiary probably passed through his hands, which is enormous if you think about how long these have been being traded for, the fact that he was dealing for perhaps 50 years or so, maybe a little bit longer actually, and we of course don't really know where a lot of these came from. So Maurice Naaman, a very important figure in the study of Egyptian antiquities, I think there's probably material, almost certainly material that was sold by him here in Chicago. H.O. Lange, who was a Danish Egyptologist, described how people would come from all over the world, both tourists and professional scholars, to his shop in Cairo to purchase material that came from all over Egypt. Now where did he get it from? Of course the majority of the things which he purchased came from Egyptian villagers who could live anywhere in Egypt. They would then send the material or work through local dealers and it would end up in Cairo, which was the central market for all of Egypt. Maurice told James Drescher that it came from Achmim, so a city in Upper Egypt near the city of Sohag. Again a nice place to visit in Egypt, lots of interesting material there. Of course we don't know for sure that's really where it came from. Very often the people who would find these artefacts either deliberately or by accident would deliberately hide the real origins so that people wouldn't be able to go and find more material in places that they were aware of. So as far as we know at this point this came from Achmim in Upper Egypt. So the story of how it got to Leiden. But let's take another step backwards before we discuss this material in more detail. Perhaps we should contextualise it both within the study of Coptic magic and within the study of the decline of traditional Egyptian religion and the rise of Christianity, because these are both important parts of the story. So the corpus of Coptic magic is a very heterogeneous corpus. There are probably lots of subdivisions that we could make within it but today I'll give you a very rough and ready, not even really a definition but more of a description of the material that we talk about when we talk about Coptic magic. So this material is produced in Coptic and hopefully you know, but for those of you who don't, Coptic is the latest stage of the Egyptian language. So it's the same language that we find written with hieroglyphs, with hieratic, with demotic, but it's a later development. So both linguistically in terms of its grammar, in terms of its vocabulary, in terms of its pronunciation, quite often I make the comparison between Latin and Italian. So if you know modern Italian you can sometimes understand bits of Latin, if you look at a Latin word and an Italian word you can see the connection, but of course things have changed, some words have disappeared, some other words have replaced them and the pronunciation has changed a lot since antiquity of course. But you can still see there's a relationship between them. There's a similar relationship between Coptic and Middle Egyptian, which is the classical form of the Egyptian language. Coptic was an actively used language between roughly the 4th and 12th centuries and of course the other big difference I should mention is that Coptic is written with a modified form of the Greek alphabet. So this is the other big difference, it's not written in an Egyptian native script and derived from hieroglyphs. So it's used between the 4th and 12th centuries alongside Greek and later Arabic and from roughly the 12th century onwards the Arabization of Egypt had reached a point in which most Christians started to speak and use Arabic in their daily lives. And I should also say of course that in this period, as we'll see, the majority of Egyptians were Christians, the majority of Coptic texts are Christian texts, and so there may seem to be a kind of contradiction here between Christianity and magic. But as we'll see perhaps the contradiction is more apparent than real. So when we talk about Coptic magical text we're talking about texts usually within a papyrological context, we're talking about texts which have certain formal and functional characteristics. So they have certain recurrent linguistic forms, so for example invocations and adjurations of divine beings. So we find phrases like I invoke you oh Michael that you come to me today, I adjure you oh 24 presbyters that you come to me today. At the end of text they'll often say phrases like quickly quickly, so I adjure you Michael that you bring this woman to me today and she loves me forever, quickly quickly. We also find these very characteristic magical names, so we call these sometimes Phokasmagikai or Onomatabarbara. We could think of these as kind of the origin of phrases like abracadabra. So in the magical text in Greek and Coptic we find recurrent magical names, so things like Abrasax, Abathinalba, Sesengenbarfarenges, these kind of words which don't necessarily have any meaning but which lend a kind of sense of super normal power. And then we have magical symbols, characteras, which are very characteristic, which first appear in Greek texts perhaps around the first century and which then spread to other magical traditions into the Middle Ages and to the present day. So these are kind of formal characteristics. When we see these things in the papyrus or another text we typically identify it as a magical text and we will start to compare it to other known magical texts. But we can also think about magic in terms of its function, the function of these texts, because these are texts which are meant to do things. So they may be amulets which are intended to protect or to heal the person who is using them. They may be more aggressive, so they may be curses which are intended to harm somebody, to bind them, to make them sick or even to kill them. They may be love spells intended to force somebody to fall in love with you. And sometimes we also find divination texts and in the context of magic we're usually talking about divination which is intended to summon an angel or a demon to appear to you and to talk to you directly about something which you want to know about. So that's a little bit about Coptic magic. In terms of the kind of religious background, this is a very very complicated topic which I'll try to cover very briefly. Of course the Egyptian religion is something which we have evidence for as early as the 3rd century BCE. Some of the earliest religious texts that we have which survive are of course the pyramid texts from the old kingdom. And the Egyptian religion continued to be practiced well into the common era in the Egyptian temples and many of the temples, the best preserved temples which you'll see if you go to Egypt today, the temples of Edfu, of Edna, of Esna, of Komombo, of Philae which you see here, many of these temples were actually produced in this late period, in the Ptolemaic or the Roman period. So this was a very productive period still in terms of the production of temples and the patronage of temples. But what we see in the Roman period in particular is a gradual decline in patronage and the reasons for this are debated. I won't go into them in detail here but it seems that essentially the temples were less financially supported and so we see a gradual decline, gradually fewer new constructions, fewer repairs and you can see this for example at Tebtunus in one papyrus from the middle of the 2nd century there are 50 priests in a census and then 30 years later or so this is reduced to 10. So there seems to be a really steep decline in the practice of the Egyptian religion over the course of the 3rd and 4th century. By the middle of the 4th century we have very little evidence for the practice of cults anywhere, so at Thebes, at Keles in the Harga oasis, in the Fayum, this oasis to the west of the Nile valley. The temple evidence for the practice of Egyptian religion disappears between the 2nd and 4th century and even at the exception, so for example in the far south at Philae where the temple continued to be used by Nubians at least into the middle of the 5th century, we see a steep decline. So at the end this very large, very impressive temple is reduced to a priesthood of two, a father and son and the last epigraphic evidence for this is the middle of the 5th century. So all the temples needed were officially closed in the 6th century but we think that this was really a formality, they had probably ceased to function a century earlier. So on the one hand we have this steep decline in the practice of Egyptian religion and on the other we have a rapid increase in the number of Christians in Egypt and this is once again a very controversial, very complicated topic but the graph which I'm presenting you with today was generated from the study of onomastic evidence in tens of thousands of papyri. Essentially looking at the names which can be identified as Christians or the use of the names of biblical figures for example is one clear sign of the increase in number of Christians in Egypt and you can see this follows what we call an S-curve. So if you think back to when iPhones first started being used, of course very few people used them, they seemed very strange, why would you want to have this thing in your pocket that only lasted for one hour or so and so only a few people had them but all of a sudden, I can't remember when was it, maybe around 2010, everybody started to get them very quickly so you see a rapid, very rapid increase in the adoption of new technology and then of course there are a few people who never want to get an iPhone and who refuse to buy them and so eventually we see a slowdown in the rate of adoption and so this is a general rule that we see for many kinds of innovations and so the fact that the onomastic evidence seems to portray this exact picture suggests that there is some kind of accuracy to it. So we can see that there's a rapid increase in Christians in Egypt in the third century, probably around the beginning of the third century and this can be linked to changes in policy so the Patriarch Demetrius started to appoint bishops outside Alexandria for the first time and this is when we start to see evidence for Egyptians, for Egyptian Christians in papyri around this period. There's of course a very rapid increase after Constantine becomes emperor so Constantine of course is the first emperor to be a practicing Christian and he and his successors start to make, well first Christianity becomes illicit religion, then the official religion and so we see a very rapid increase in the fourth century. By the end of the fourth century Christians are probably majority in Egypt and then by the middle of the fifth century they're really the overwhelming majority and we have very little good evidence for non-Christians in Egypt after the fifth century. So this is the kind of very general overview of the picture. This is a little bit of a contrast to previous generations of scholarship so until about 30 years ago there was an idea that there had been a real battle between paganism and Christianity and this picture came to a large extent from hagiographies, stories of saints lives which often describe holy men going to temples, killing sacred animals, destroying cult statues, burning the temples down. Nowadays there's a tendency in scholarship to see these as kind of later inventions, there's not a lot of direct evidence for this kind of conflict. Rather the is to see the decline of the traditional Egyptian religion and the rise of Christianity as two separate but parallel developments and maybe there's kind of a period in the fourth century as David Frankfurter suggested in which kind of religion had retreated to the private sphere, perhaps the home, perhaps on the local level without leaving much evidence in the temples, creating a space for Christianity to kind of take over as the official public religion. Be that as it may this is a very rough picture but of course one of the interesting things about Coptic magic is we see perhaps some kind of exception to this picture. As I've mentioned already we continue to see mentions of the traditional Egyptian deities Isis and Horus in magical texts as late as the 9th century and what's particularly interesting about this is these show very real continuity with much older texts that we can date as far back perhaps as the Middle Kingdom but certainly as the New Kingdom. So Coptic magic is perhaps one of the only spheres in which we see real cultural textual continuity across what's often seen as a kind of wall of fire which separates Christian and pre-Christian Egypt. In a lot of other spheres in terms of public culture in terms of literature there's a quite a striking difference between the two periods which is often a little bit difficult to bridge. However I should say that these texts which mention these non-Christian deities Horus and Isis are really the minority. The majority of Christian magical texts or texts which we describe as magical are rather very much Christian in their inspiration. So one fairly common type of magical text or amuletic text really, we have an expert here with us in Joe Sanzo who studied these texts probably more deeply than anyone, a very common type of amulet is the insipid amulet. These are texts which take the beginning, the first lines of the four Gospels of Psalm 1991 and sometimes of other texts such as the letter of Jesus to King Abgar and these short extracts stand in some way either for the whole text or for part of the text and therefore containing them the kind of amuletic sacred power of the holy text itself. And these are a very common type of amulet that we start to find perhaps from the third century or so onwards and what's interesting about these is that these seem to have been considered a legitimate form of ritual practice by the church authorities. So we have statements from Augustine and Chrysostom for example where they say that rather than using a magical amulet, rather than using something that has the names of demons or of non-canonical angels, should rather use these biblical texts which are at least part of accepted Christian practice at the time. Even when texts are perhaps not quite so orthodox or quite so accepted by the ecclesiastical authorities, they are still generally very Christian in inspiration. So a good representative example is the text which you see here known as the Indoxon of Michael, a prayer which is attributed to the archangel Michael in which he calls upon God to grant healing to anybody who says the prayer. It contains of course these magical symbols which we've already said are a characteristic. It contains a lot of these these abracadabra words which are considered the names of angels and the names of other celestial beings. It contains invocations and adjurations of celestial powers and so it really seems to draw upon the same kind of vocabulary and structure of much older Greco-Roman texts but adapts them to a very Christian world view. So as I've suggested there is a kind of quite big cultural shift that we see around the 4th, 5th century when you move from an Egyptian culture which is centred on the older pharaonic culture into the Christian and then of course later from the 7th century onwards into a majority Muslim culture. But of course what remains is of course the physical landscape and the physical landscape of Egypt as anybody who's been to Egypt will know is very much marked with the remains of the pharaonic history, the tombs, the temples and in some cases even habitations, so abandoned towns which remain in the desert. And so Egyptians, Christians and Muslims were always aware and always lived beside this history and this is something which is really not studied enough, the kind of Egyptian native view of their own past and their own history. But we occasionally find some glimpses of it, so Qasr al-Daily has written a very interesting, very rich book called Egyptology the Missing Millennium and in a passage from this book he cites a story of a bunch of treasure hunters in the 12th century who broke into a pyramid looking for treasure, so kind of part of the same tradition to which the treasure hunters who would have sold objects to Maurice Nahman belonged. One of their party went missing and three days later they managed to find him apparently stuck in a wall with a face red and apparently he'd gone mad, ranting and raving in a language which they couldn't understand. They eventually found a monk, so a Coptic monk who in theory at least should speak Coptic and he was able to understand it and he translated this is the fate of those who violate the sanctity of kings in their homes. So this kind of gives us a sense of the one way in which they would have understand these monuments which still remain as the lair of these kings of the distant past, sometimes haunted by jinn who were able to protect them and were able to wreak vengeance on anybody who tried to seek treasure incautiously. We see a link of course here to Coptic, so the word Copt comes from the and this was used not only to refer to Christians but also in fact to refer to all of the pre-Islamic inhabitants of Egypt. So they would refer habitually to the pharaohs as Copti, as Copts and so they of course knew that Coptic was ultimately the indigenous language of Egypt. But this is of course only one part of the picture and when we as Westerners go to Egypt very often of course we are most interested in the pharaonic past but this is only of course one part of history and in fact treasure hunting manuals which are a very common genre in fact of magical texts really in the middle ages in Egypt, very often they're less concerned with the treasure in pharaonic sites and often more interested in the treasures in monasteries, in Fatimid, in Umayyad mosques. There's often a concern with treasure left behind by the Romans when they retreated following the Arab invasion. So they were of course aware of their pharaonic past but this was often something seen through the lens of Christian or really biblical or Quranic texts. They understood these pharaohs as the pharaohs of the exodus for example and this past was only one past which they were interested in. They were also interested in the earlier Islamic, Christian and Roman past. So let's now return to this object which I teased at the beginning. Now one thing I didn't tell you is this is in fact only one of a pair and the second bone which I unfortunately have not had a chance to examine in person is in Milan. So both texts probably date from the 9th century so the handwriting is very, I mean you can see it's a little bit hard to read, but it's a handwriting which probably dates to the 9th century. This is relatively late. It's a period when Christians are starting to become a minority in Egypt and more and more Egyptians are converting to Islam. Now how did this end up in Milan? Well once again it was sold by the Nahman family. So Maurice Nahman, this very important figure in the Egyptian antiquities trade, he not only had a son but he also had several daughters, one of whom was Alexandra Nahman who married an Italian, moved to Egypt and she donated this bone. Apparently they split the between the brother and the sister and she donated this one to the university in Milan. And I'm actually going to talk a bit more about this one because it's better written and so the text is a little bit more comprehensible and a little bit easier to understand. So let's finally read the text. So I'll read it to you. These are the names of the six powers of death, they who bring every sickness down upon every man, who bring every soul out of every body. I call, I adjure you by your names and your powers and your places in the salvation of death, that you go to Harun, the son of Tekuekira and take his soul. I adjure you, a dead one, by the way that you took and the punishment that came upon you and that you heard of and the punishment that you saw and the terrible faces that you saw and the river of fire which casts wave upon wave, that at the moment that I place this bone under you, that just as you have suffered, you shall bring your suffering upon Harun, the son of Tekuekira. Yeah, yeah, quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly. So you can see it's quite a striking text, quite a nasty text. We don't really know what Harun, son of Tekuekira, did to deserve this but presumably the person who commissioned it had his reasons. So Harun is an interesting name, it's of course a form of the name Aaron, a biblical name, but specifically this form with initial and an O sound here, this actually tells us probably the Arabic form of the name Harun. And so although the mother has a Coptic name, so Tekuekira means something like little lady, these nicknames of this type are actually quite common in this period, he himself has an Arabic name. This may be because he or his parents are converts to Islam and so he's adopted an Arab name, but it may also just be that he is a Christian who speaks Arabic and who has therefore started to use an Arabic name in daily life. In any case, this is obviously a curse, it's a curse intended to either kill someone or to make them suffer so much that they maybe would wish they were dead. And we can see some of the features which I mentioned earlier is typical of magical texts and we can see the adjuration of these six powers of death and of a dead person, we can see these phrases yeah, yeah, quickly, quickly, and we can see these very typical magical names, so Kokos, Thropos, Kimpias, Pstotomus and so on. And so this actually tells us, even though we don't really know much about where it comes from at the beginning, it actually tells us a little bit about its physical context. So it talks to, it addresses a dead person and it says I will place this bone under you. So we can guess therefore that it comes from a tomb, that it was buried under or at least near to a dead body. So even without knowing exactly where it comes from, this starts to tell us a little bit about how it was conceived, how the mechanics of the spell were conceived. So this is a very complicated text and I've written an article about it which I can give you the details of later if you're more interested about it. What I'm going to do now is talk about a few of these aspects and what they tell us. Perhaps it's not immediately obvious how this relates to what I've been talking about so far, pharaonic civilization, but I promise you I'm going to get there eventually. So this is part of a long curse tradition and this curse tradition can be traced back to several distinct roots, but for me the most convincing is that of the Greek katadesmoi or binding curses. And we once again have one of the world's greatest experts of these texts with us today in Chris Faraone who is here at the University of Chicago. So these are texts which first are tested materially in the Greek-speaking world, in particular in Sicily, in the 6th, 5th century BCE. These are typically texts which are written upon lead. They're curses intended to bind somebody to make them harmless or to prevent them from doing something. These would be written down, folded and then buried with probably an element of oral performance which may have preceded this material practice of writing. And this practice which begins in the Greek-speaking world later spreads around the Mediterranean and even beyond. So we have later examples in Latin, in Aramaic, in Coptic and even in some of the vernacular languages of Europe, in the Celtic languages for example. They're typically buried, very often in a grave, so we can see here one of these connections to the bone that we're talking about. And as Chris has suggested in a very important analysis of these which he carried out in the Very often these are related to some kind of social competition. So the Greek texts, one thing that's nice about the Greek texts is they're usually a bit more, they give us a bit more information about the context in which they're produced. So they tell us why they're binding somebody or they tell us the particular context in which they want to bind somebody. And very often these are, so Chris has put these in several categories, so often this is related to some kind of sporting or theatrical event. So for example you're betting on a race and you want the person who you're betting against to lose and so you bind them in order to make them lose. Perhaps you want to sleep with somebody but they may not be accessible because they're sleeping with someone else, so you bind them so they can no longer have sex with that other person. Perhaps you have a legal case and you're worried you're going to lose, so you bind your legal opponents, they're not able to speak against you. So this, obviously we can't just apply this to the Coptic evidence, but it kind of starts to give us a sense of the kind of situation in which somebody may have commissioned a curse against Harun, some kind of social conflict in which they wanted to remove Harun from the situation. And of course, as I said, these spread throughout the Greek-speaking world and beyond, and of course Egypt becomes part of the Greek-speaking world when Alexander conquers the Persian Empire, and we start to find kata desmoi in Egypt from the first century CE onwards. Now elsewhere in the Greeks and Latin-speaking world these are usually written on lead, and we do have some examples from lead, so for example there's this very nice assembly here in which we have a lead curse from Antinopolis in Middle Egypt, but we also find them in Egypt written on papyrus, and perhaps there were papyrus examples from elsewhere in the empire as well, but of course papyrus only really survives under very special conditions which are usually only met in Upper Egypt. So we know that these spread to Egypt and we know that they were therefore available to influence the later Christian Coptic tradition, and one particularity which is quite interesting about the Egyptian case is that alongside lead and alongside papyrus we also start to find the use of bone. This is very interesting because it's something that continues for a very, very long time. So there are a few examples of Arabic curses written on bones. So you have here an example, unfortunately it's not well dated, it's probably medieval, but it's an Arabic curse written on the shoulder blade of a sheep, and in fact you can find examples of this if you go on YouTube today. So this is a channel called the Arraqi channel, which means something like the exorcist channel. I think Arraqi was actually the name of the film The Exorcist in Egyptian. So if you go to YouTube, if you type in an Arabic campaign against magic or magic in graveyards, something like this, you'll actually find lots of videos of people who go to cemeteries and who will dig in the corner and they'll find all kinds of curses which have been buried there. And as you can see often they do take the form of bones of shoulder blades which have text written on them. Of course they take other forms as well, so they sometimes are photographs and sometimes they're dolls which are tied up, but it's a very nice example of really long-range continuity over time. I should mention an interesting detail one of my Egyptian colleagues mentioned, which is that some people think that these may actually be planted by the people who film these videos for effect. So this is a complicated question, but it does show some kind of continuity. In the Coptic case actually these bones are particularly interesting. So there's at least two other texts written on bone, one here, one here, this one on top is published, it's in Florence I think, this bottom one in London is not yet published. I'm hoping to be able to publish it sometime in the future. I'm not sure if you can tell exactly what kinds of bones these are, but they're actually human bones. So this is part of a skull, this is part of a human rib, so a particularly gruesome form of practice. And this one is certainly a curse, this one I'm guessing is probably a curse as well. Now another thing that's quite interesting about this is that we find the use of bones in aggressive magic in another tradition, and particularly skulls actually. So we actually find this in the Jewish magical tradition from Egypt. So one of the very, really very rich source of texts from medieval Egypt is the Cairo Geniza. So this is a group of texts which are produced primarily between the 9th and 11th century by the Jewish community in old Cairo, and basically these texts would not be thrown away very often, they would be put in a hole in the wall in the Ben Ezra synagogue, and so for almost a millennium, over a millennium, this pile of texts just built up and up and up, and in the 19th and 20th centuries it was gradually opened up and then sold to collections around the world. And one thing they discovered is that this contained, I can't remember the number, I think there's thousands actually, of magical texts, and these often describe and detail the magical practices of the Jews of Fatimid Egypt. And one thing that's very interesting is that we find descriptions of curse practice which involve writing on the ribs of animals. So you can see here, and actually I should say that of course the text I'm talking about is Coptic and probably produced by Christians, these are texts of course which are being produced by Jews, but they're in the same country, they're probably both starting to use Arabic as their common language even though they belong to different communities, and so we're probably seeing here continuity in practice across religious communities, which is a very interesting thing, something which really deserves to be explored in more detail. There's an article about this by Gideon Bohack looking at similarities between Coptic and Greek and Jewish magic in Egypt, but I think there's a lot more work to be done here. So let's now get a little bit more into the details of the text. So the first part of it adheres the powers of death, and it gives their names. So who are the powers of death? Well fortunately we know a lot about them. There's lots of descriptions of these beings in Coptic literature from the time, and actually it already begins in Greek, although it's very abundant and very rich in Coptic. So for example in the book of Bartholomew, this is an apocryphal text which describes Jesus's harrowing of hell and his resurrection. So it describes how after Jesus's crucifixion, after his death, death, so the personified being death, realizes that there's a soul of somebody who has died, has not come under his power, and he's trying to figure out what has happened, and so he goes to the tomb of Jesus to figure out what's happening, and he takes with his six sons, and their names are Gaius, Tryphon, Ophiath, Thenon, Satomas, and Comfion, and they're in the forms of serpents who wriggle around. And you can see here a depiction from a church in Tebtunus of serpents, of hellish serpents, who are attacking a woman. This is a man who goes to prostitutes, and this is a woman who is perhaps a prostitute or perhaps a wet nurse, it's not entirely clear, and you can see they're being tormented by serpents. So these powers of death are associated with the personified power of death. Here they're called his sons, but in other texts they're referred to as the powers of death, as his servants, as his officers, and very often they're referred to with this term deacon. So it's a word which is very interesting, as I'll describe in a moment. Here we have another Coptic literary text, this is the death of Joseph the carpenter, which describes how the father of Jesus died. So Jesus is with his father who is lying in his deathbed, he's near death, and he looks to the south, so in Coptic thought death comes physically from the south, death comes and with him is a multitude of his servants, the deacons, and they have terrible faces, they're girt with fire, they're countless, they're breathing fire. In other texts we find descriptions of them as wearing black armour, as having the heads of various kinds of animals, as carrying hooks, and what they do is they basically drag the souls of sinners out of their bodies, either using their hooks or using their teeth, and you can see a depiction of this actually happening, a deacon actually pulling a soul out of the body, so you can see here somebody on their deathbed, and the soul looks like a tiny version of the person which is pulled out of the mouth. So the powers of death are essentially the psychogog, the figures who come and to take the sinners from their bodies and who take them to hell, and then when they're in hell they then torture them. So these are these terrible figures, and in this text of course we see that they are called upon to attack this living person who's not on his deathbed and to take his soul just as they would take the soul of sinners. Now one thing that is quite interesting is that they're referred to very often in the tradition as deacons, and described as having various animal heads. I don't have time to go into detail into what is a deacon, but essentially this is an astrological context which is once again a very old Egyptian astrological concept. So in Mesopotamian astrology, which then later influences modern astrology, the ecliptics, the path through which the sun goes, is divided into 12 parts, and each of these parts is called a zodiacal sign, so we have 12 signs of the zodiac. The Egyptians divided the same space into 36 divisions, and each of these divisions was associated with a star or a group of stars, and in Greek these are called dekhanoi, because each one of them is associated with 10 days, so the word dekhanos means something like leader of 10. And in Greek Egyptian astrology, which borrowed these figures, the deacons are typically depicted as animal-headed beings. And one of the things that's particularly interesting about the Egyptian Christian tradition is these deacons, who also appear in other Christian traditions from around Christendom, are particularly associated as having animal heads, and often the descriptions are very rich. They have the heads of lions, of donkeys, of wolves, of serpents, of dragons, and Heike Bellmer suggests this may actually be because when Christians would go to pharaonic monuments and see these various animal-headed deities, the association they would make would be to the deacons, so they very often perhaps associate these figures they saw depicted on pagan monuments with these terrible figures who were associated with the forces of death. So we start to see perhaps one way in which the pagan past influenced the imaginary of Egyptian Christians. The second part of the text, though, addresses a different being, and this addresses a dead person. And of course, as you can probably tell, this is a description of somebody in hell. And once again, in Christian texts, we have very rich descriptions which match this quite closely. So the person is punished, they see punishments, they see other sinners being punished, and in particular we see this river of fire which casts wave upon wave. This is a very characteristic recurrent description of hell in late antique Christian texts, and particularly in Coptic. So of course, one of the earliest descriptions of this is in the Apocalypse of Paul, in which the apostle Paul goes to hell and sees all the sinners being punished, and he describes in detail this river of hell in which sinners are immersed to varying degrees, depending on the degree to which they have sinned. So we have a description here of somebody in hell, and this person in hell is called upon to bring this suffering upon the person who is cursed. So this is an example of what is often called a persuasive analogy. So we say that just as you have suffered, so may the other person suffer. The analogy is made, but the analogy is not just a linguistic analogy, a discursive analogy, rather the analogy is meant to do something, to transfer a state in which somebody already is to somebody else. Now of course, this creates a problem for us, because for this to work, you have to put the bone with somebody who is in hell. But of course, how do you know that a dead person is in hell? It's not an obvious thing to know. Of course we could guess in some cases, but in general in Christianity, the idea is that of course only God knows the ultimate fate of individuals, and in particular Christian traditions, perhaps particular saints, particular holy men, may have a special insight which allows them to see what happens to people after their death. But there's a very interesting solution to this, and of course this lies in pharaonic civilization. So in all of these tombs all over Egypt, you have dead pagans, and of course within the Christian tradition, we know that pagans worshipped beings who were essentially demons, and of course for this, we know that they are in hell. So in Egypt, they have these tombs which are very accessible, very visible, which are full of sinners who are burning in hell, and who can therefore be used in these curses. We have explicit evidence for this in Coptic curses, which in fact specify that these are to be buried in the tombs of pagans. So you have a very interesting, very well-known example, a curse from Edfu, which is today in the Louvre, which says that this text will be buried at the door of the tomb of these pagans. We find other texts which mention the use of pagan bodies and of pagan tombs as a site for the deposition of curses. Now we can actually go a bit further than this, because there's actually another detail which I've hidden from you, which is that we have not only two texts, we actually have three texts, and this one was actually discovered relatively recently. I have the year here, it was discovered in 2004 to 2005, and so when I discovered this, I realised that finally we had, maybe not the last piece of the puzzle, but another very important piece of the puzzle. Now you can see it's much, much more badly damaged, but in fact when you read it, it's exactly the same text. So the same text is repeated on all three bones. We don't know if for certain of this was a curse against Tarun, the name of the victim doesn't survive, but it's written with the same text and in fact in the very same hand. If you compare the handwriting of the three bones, we can actually say it's the same scribe. So this is something which almost never happens in the study of Coptic magical texts, but of course it was very exciting and I had to of course write an article about it when I discovered it. So this actually allows us to all of a sudden go from knowing very little about where it came from, to being able to locate perhaps within a few metres where these two texts came from. So they come from not Achmem, but rather Asyut, so a little bit north of the original location which Nahman was told, or which he at least related to James Drescher. It comes from the western mountain of Asyut, so you can see the rows of these pharaonic tombs on the western mountain. The tomb was actually accessible throughout history, so we have records of people visiting it in the 18th and the 19th centuries. It's actually in slightly worse condition today than it was when Napoleon's scholars drew it, so you can see it used to have a doorway with windows that has been removed, so all that remains is the open facade. And this is what the tomb looks like now. So this was built in the first intermediate period for a nomarch, but it was used continuously for burial and reburial into the Christian period, so it's a bit hard to say exactly what that means, but perhaps in the 5th century at that point it became a monastery, and the site as a whole was used as a monastery until the 15th century. We don't really know for sure when this tomb stopped being used as a monastery and when it was abandoned, so we unfortunately don't know the exact situation. We do know that it was an open tomb, that it was being visited by people in the 19th and 20th centuries, so it's almost certain in fact that the people who sold the bones to Maurice Nahman would have gone into this tomb and found it. And what's quite interesting is there's four separate burial shafts. These three were open at the time that it was excavated, in the 2000s. The fourth one was only discovered in the recent excavations of the Asyut project. So what I suspect is that the two bones which were found came from one of these three shafts, whereas the fourth shaft which was only discovered is where of course the third final bone was found. So we can now say that we have three bones, we know a bit more about where they came from, and of course they were found in a pagan tomb, so we can finally put the pieces together. So the person who created these, who used them, presumably they lived at Asyut, presumably they could see these tombs, I mean you can see them from the Nile Valley. They knew the tombs were there, they knew that they were in a sense a resource to be used in their magical practice. Now what's interesting is that we can see this awareness of the tombs and of the bodies of the dead and of the bodies of the pagan dead and of their state in hell in a lot of Christian literature. In fact not just Christian literature, we also find this is the later Islamic literature, but the earliest example that I can find is in the Apothic Mata Patrum, so a fourth century text which contains a story of Saint Macarius and the skull. So Saint Macarius is one of the early desert fathers, so an ascetic who lived in the desert, and there's a story that he was wandering in the Egyptian desert and he came across a skull. So this still happens in Egypt, people are wandering, they come across remains of somebody who's buried in the desert, and because he's a holy man who can work miracles, he nudges and he says, who are you? And the skull reveals that in fact he was a high priest of the pagans, but he's currently burning in hell. But when Macarius prays for him, all of a sudden he's able to see his neighbour, and this human contact gives him a little bit of relief from the eternal suffering in which he is in. But of course the pagan priest tells him there's something worse than this, and this fate that is worse is reserved for those Christians who have denied God. And so of course even though he's a dead pagan, he's still doing some kind of rhetorical work for Christians. He's warning the contemporary readers that of course if they abandon the faith, their fate will be worse than his. This is the theme which recurs in Christian literature, and of course it's even magnified. So in the life of Paul of Tama, it's not just one dead person, but in fact it's 654 dead people who are raised from the dead by the holy man, and not only does he talk to them, he actually baptises them. So they beg to be baptised, and he baptises them, and so he's miraculously able to save them from hell, not only just relieve them of their suffering. But I think the nicest example of this is from the life of Pesantius. So Pesantius was the bishop of Coptos in Upper Egypt in the 7th century, and for a large part of his life he lived in the Theban desert in a tomb. And in his life there's a text which my colleague Sophia knows very well. This tomb is described in great detail. So it's described in terms of size, 52 cubits wide, it has pillars in it, it's full of mummified bodies, and one can smell the perfume which comes from these bodies. As they look at them they see that their fingers and toes are individually wrapped. And what's of course interesting about this is for anybody who works on these tombs, it's actually quite an accurate description of what the Theban tombs look like. So this kind of style of pillared tomb is very common in Theban region, and even this detail that the fingers and toes are individually wrapped is something that we once again do find. So this is a Roman period mummy from Thebes, and you can see that the fingers and toes are individually wrapped. And mummies do often have the smell related to the material used in embalming. So you can see that although this particular text is of course written probably long after his death, it's not necessarily describing the tomb in which he really was, it really does show the person who wrote it knew about these tombs. They had visited them, they knew about the bodies that were found there, they knew about their physical structure, and when they wrote this hagiography they drew upon that knowledge and this attention that they paid to the physical remains of the past. Now as you expect, of course, Passentius as a holy man is able to talk to the mummy. His disciple John comes to bring him food one day and he overhears him talking to the dead person, and the person reveals that when they lived they worshipped the god Poseidon, so strangely enough they're worshipping a Greek god in Thebes for whom there's not really any evidence of his worship. He's tortured ceaselessly in hell because he didn't worship Christ, but when the holy man prays for him once again he receives a little bit of relief, and so he asks Passentius to continue praying for him so that he and the other souls in hell may have a little bit of relief. So I'm going to wrap up there and reflect perhaps a little bit on these different themes. So what I've talked about today is one particular story of interaction, the idea that Christian Egyptians very often saw their pagan past in very Christian terms. So in terms of the dead bodies, these dead pagans were suffering in hell and could therefore be used for various purposes. In the hagiographies they're used in the sense that the past is made to speak for the Christian present. These dead pagans attest to the truth of Christianity, to the fact that hell exists, that hell is dangerous, and that for those Christians who refuse to recognise this fact and who continue to sin, this reality waits for them. For the users of this curse there's rather a kind of weaponisation of this past, this knowledge that these bodies who they could visit, who they could see, are in hell and they can basically use this in their ritual practice to harm their enemies. As I said there's something quite interesting about this of course, and I mentioned earlier on that there's often a sense nowadays that Christianisation and the end pharaonic religion are two kind of separate phenomena which don't really interact with each other, and so the dramatic conflict of the transition is kind of downplayed. What I think is quite interesting about these stories is they seem to perhaps speak to a certain anxiety. Of course in traditional Egyptian religion the continuity of the family line, the worship of the ancestors, the veneration of the ancestors is very important, and this is a theme which we see in many traditional societies, and what we sometimes find in these moments of Christianisation is a kind of anxiety about what is going to happen to our family, what's going to happen to our pagan parents, our pagan grandparents. If we believe in Christianity does this mean that all of our ancestors are all of a sudden doomed to hell? I think that what we sometimes see in these stories about the interaction of holy men with their pagan ancestors is a kind of sympathy for them, the sense that the holy man is able to somehow save them, somehow redeem them. We really see this in the sense that these people are kind of pitiful and deserving of the prayers of their Christian descendants. Now of course this is perhaps a slightly negative view of things, the idea that the pagan past is only seen in terms of its relationship to the worship of demons and of hell, and of course there are other stories that could be told and deserve to be told. So modern anthropologists for example often describe Egyptians, for example, burning incense before the Sphinx, or pregnant women going to the Hathor temples. So there are of course other ways of interacting with the pre-Christian, pre-Islamic past, and these deserve to be talked about and explored, and I hope that people will continue to do it in the future. But for now I thank you for my attention, I thank you for your attention rather, and I'm glad that I've been able to stay awake for this whole time, and I hope that we have a little bit of time for questions.