A delicious Kyprianos Christmas cookie made by the Preiningers 

We’ve just posted our third and last update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects for 2020. As well as correcting some small mistakes in manuscript and text entries, the update includes:

  • 47 new manuscript entries, bringing the total to 795.
    • The database now includes all entries for the Greek magical texts from Supplementum Magicum(SM), published by Robert Daniel and Franco Maltomini.
    • The manuscripts table now also contains links to the database To Zodion, directed by Raquel Martín Hernández, and containing copies and descriptions of drawings from magical texts.
  • 5 new edited texts, bringing the total to 27. These include:
    • …the three texts of P. Mil. Vogl. Copt. 3, which contains another interesting love spell calling upon the traditional Egyptian deities Isis, Osiris and Apis; our new edition was produced in collaboration with Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin, who recently completed a doctoral thesis on these texts.
    • a beautiful limestone amulet now held in the National Museum in Scotland which contains two prayers written by the monk Frange who lived in a pharaonic tomb near Thebes in the early eighth century.
    • a very strange curse invoking a scorpion, held in the Pushkin museum in Moscow.
  • 3 new archive entries, bringing the total to 13.
    • We are aware that the archives page was not showing for some users; this problem should now be fixed.

In other news, we’ve added a new bibliography for Greek magical texts, which, like our existing bibliography for Coptic magical texts, contains many links to useful online books and articles. Although the Greek-language bibliography is not yet complete, we’ll be updating both over time, as well as adding new bibliographies to reflect the growth of the Kyprianos database.

We’d like to wish all of our readers happy and healthy end of year holidays, and a good start to 2021!