;!;'' ':::] .-(.. '., 'I V a i mm Mt i; ! ii. iiii ^''mni: i\ • r i ! > Digitized by tine Internet Archive in 2007 witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.archive.org/details/aramaicincantatiOOmontuoft UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA THE MUSEUM PUBLICATIONS OF THE BABYLONIAN SECTION ARAMAIC INCANTATION TEXTS FROM NIPPUR BY JAMES A. MONTGOMERY PROFESSOR AT THE PHILADELPHIA DIVINITY SCHOOL AND ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ECKLEY BRINTON COXE JUNIOR FUND PHILADELPHIA PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM 1913 P7 630411 TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER FIRST AND BEST OF TEACHERS CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE 7 INTRODUCTION 13 I. SURVEY OF THE MATERIAL § 1. The Material in the Museum 13 § 2. The Material Hitherto Published and in Other Collections 16 § 3. Some Notes on the Texts Hitherto Published.. 23 II. SCRIPT AND LANGUAGE § 4. Introductory 26 § 5. The "Rabbinic" Texts 27 § 6. The Syriac Texts 32 § 7. The Mandaic Texts 37 III. THE MAGIC OF THE TEXTS § 8. The Praxis of the Inscribed Bowls 40 § 9. The Exorcists 46 § 10. The Clients 49 § 1 1. The Incantations 51 § 12. The Objects of Exorcism; the Demons, etc 67 § 13. Propitious Angels, Deities, etc 95 IV. HISTORICAL CONCLUSIONS § 14. Age of the Bowls 102 § 15. Relations of the Bowl-Magic 106 (5) : CONTENTS. TEXTS PAGE Nos. 1-42. Transliteration, Translation, Notes 117 Nos. 1-30. "Rabbinic" Texts 117 Nos. 31-37. Syriac Texts 223 Nos. 38-40. Mandaic Texts 244 Appendix: No. 41. An Inscribed Skull 256 No. 42. A Form of the Lilith Legend 258 GLOSSARIES: Prefatory Note 267 A. Personal Names 269 B. Personal Names and Epithets of Deities, Angels, Demons, etc 274 C. General Glossary 281 GENERAL INDEX. 309 PREFATORY NOTE TO THE PLATES 319 REGISTER OF THE BOWLS 321 PLATES Texts Alphabetic Tables Photograph of Bowl PREFACE The primary purpose of this pubUcation was to edit, with translation and necessary notes, the incantation texts inscribed on bowls from Nippur, now in the possession of the Museum. But it soon became apparent that full account should be made of all other published texts of like character, both for my own advantage in securing a larger material for collation and also for the convenience of scholars by presenting in one work a survey of a rather remote and scattered field, in which many have labored but none has attempted a treatment of the sub- ject at large. I have accordingly not only given a description of all the earlier material but also collated it as fully as possible both in the Glossaries and in the references of Introduction and Commentary. The Introduction, thus extended beyond the field of the Nippur texts, has grown to still greater dimen- sions with the enlarging perception of the intimate relations between the bowl-inscriptions and the broad fields of ancient magical literature. Previous editors, working before the pres- ent great development of the study of magic, had taken little notice of these connections with a wider world. Analogies with the Talmud and possible connections with the Kabbalis- tic lore had been pointed out, but the bowls still remained without definite place or links in the general field of ancient magic. Withal the relations of Jewish magic to the larger whole have not yet been ascertained. But within the last few decades an immense advance has been made in our knowledge of ancient magic and of its prime importance as a study in the history of mankind. The chief (7) 8 UNIVERSITY MUSEUM. BABYLONIAN SECTION. stimulus to this has come, first, from the anthropologists and the students of comparative religion, who have taught us not to ignore the most primitive or most degraded manifestations of the human spirit. Then there have been the rapid strides in the advance of Egyptology and Assyriology, where at every step the student faces the problem of the identities and differ- ences of magic and religion. Further, the classical philologists have at last condescended to examine the vulgar magical records in the Greek and Latin tongues, and have found an interest in them as revealing how the ancient "man of the street," and wiser men as well, actually talked and thought, in modes different from the traditional standards of the classical civiliza- tion. Of this large increase in material and understanding I have been fortunately able to avail myself, with the result of the discovery of innumerable clues proving that the bowl- magic is in part the lineal descendant of the old Babjdonian sorcery while at the same time—and this is the more impor- tant because a less expected discover}^—it takes its place in that great field of Hellenistic magic which pervaded the whole of the western world at the beginning of the Christian era. My chief contribution to the study has been in these two direc- tions, the relations with the cuneiform religious texts and the Greek magical papyri. The writer's knowledge of Egyptian magic was wholly at second hand, and in any case that earlier influence was mediated to this special field through Hellenism. The Christian Syrian literature is shown to have its close con- nections, being thoroughly infused, as was the early Church, with magical ideas. Magic within Judaism has been the subject of capital monographs by competent Jewish scholars, and in that direction I have not been able to do much more than to appropriate their results, except so far as to show the absolute J. A. MONTGOMERY—ARAMAIC INCANTATION' TEXTS. 9 community of ideas and terms and practice between Jewish and Gentile sorcery. It remains a subject for an interesting investigation to discover just what Judaism gave to, and what it received from, the Hellenistic magic, but probably a hope- less study, for, as someone has remarked, in the history of magic we must pursue not the genealogical but the analogical method. As a result of these comparisons, the conclusion must be drawn, as indicated in § 15 of the Introduction, that the magic of the bowls, and in a general way, all Jewish magic, has come out of the crucible of the Graeco-Roman world, which, on account of its dominating civilization, we call Hellenistic; it is not Jewish but eclectic. However, with this broadening of the scope of the work, it has been the fixed purpose not to attempt any general study of magic; this would have been but to confuse my work and cloud my results. With a single eye, the facts of the texts have been illustrated in as objective a way as possible from the phenomena of locally inherited and contemporaneous magic, with the intent of establishing the immediate bonds of connec- tion. My work would be a contribution from a very small and limited field to the study of magical thought and practice within a definite age and region. At least there has come to the writer the satisfaction of finding a place for the membra disjecta of these out-of-the-way texts in the huge colossus of that system of magic which was once almost the actual religion of our western civilization. If I appear to have gone into much detail in the treatment of these non-literary texts, I trust that the results will justify my undertaking; the expansion of the work has proceeded naturally and subtly much beyond the editor's desire and convenience. From the philological point of view these vulgar inscriptions are of as much interest to the Semitist as are the 10 UNIVERSITY MUSEUM. BABYLONIAN SECTION. magical papyri to the classicist. Careful study shows that, with the exception of intentionally unintelligible passages, mystic phrases and the like, the words and the syntax of the texts are the autograph representatives of the language of their writers. Three different Aramaic dialects, each with its own script, and one script a peculiar variety of the Edessene, are offered in the bowls from Nippur, and they are of importance as original documents of the dialectic forms of the speech of Babylonia about the eve of the rise of Islam. Other original monuments are well-nigh lacking for this field; we are confined almost entirely to the school-literatures of rehgious sects, of the Jews, Christian Syrians and Mandaeans, whose books are preserved mostly in late manuscripts. The Jewish magical literature is all documentarily late or uncertain as to age, and our texts have a historical worth as almost the earliest records in that line which can be exactly dated. Further, the obscure and crabbed condition of the texts compelled an exact philo- logical examination in order to test hypotheses of interpreta- tion. And as to matters beyond philology, it will not, I hope, be set down to wilful acriby if I have attempted to work out very small clues. In such work as this there is no immediate compensation on the surface, and it is onlj- by following out the fine tendrils of connection that results worth while can be obtained. The writer's experience in his study is well expressed by some words of Professor Deissmann: "It may be that hundreds of stones, tiresomely repeating the same monoto- nous formula, have only the value of a single authority, yet in their totality, these epigraphic results furnish us with plenty of material—only one should not expect too much of them, or too little" {Bible Studies, 82). In regard to the representation of the texts it might have been technically more correct to present them in their several J. A. MONTGOMERY—ARAMAIC INCANTATION TEXTS. H scripts. But apart from the difficulty of procuring two of these types in American printing houses and compositors who could set them, it must be patent that the general convenience is far better subserved by presenting the texts in the well-known Hebrew character, while those who desire the original scripts can satisfy themselves with the facsimiles published in the second volume.