Bøger i Archiv für Papyrusforschung und verwandte Gebiete - Reihefte serien

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.

This volume of Papyri contains a selection of 25 pieces which were excavated in the village of Karanis in the north-eastern Fayum (Egypt) by American archaeologists between 1924 and 1926. Many of the texts published here come from the archive of a well known figure in the village life of Karanis in the 2nd century AD: Socrates, son of Sarapion, was a tax collector here for many years, serving the Roman Empire collecting taxes due in money and in kind. Besides his successful economic activities - Socrates certainly belonged to the upper stratum of society in Karanis - the tax collector was a lover of Greek literature; for sure, he did not venture into high philosophy and the like, but he read Homer, comedies, and tried to be up to date about mythology in plays. Half of the new texts published here are literary, mostly from Socrates' library; other texts were found in the immediate neighbourhood of where Socrates lived, such as a surgical treatise about remedies of shoulder dislocations, which perhaps belonged to a doctor. The other half of the papyrus texts in this volume are documents that can shed new light on the activities of the tax collector, or of other inhabitants of Karanis. Altogether they give us a vivid picture of village life in Graeco/Roman Egypt in the 2nd century AD.