This is an important book for a number of reasons, not least of all because it represents the thoughtful attentions of a number of different experts, including specialists on the use and conservation of processed leather (not vellum), on archival background of an important collection at the British Museum, and on the philology and history of the texts therein preserved: seven pieces of tanned leather that were inscribed in Coptic with a series of recipes for magical rituals or devices used for cures, cursing, erotic subjugation, and success in business. These recipes, moreover, offer plenty of food for thought for the folklorist. Hay no. 1, for example, invokes three triads of superhuman entities who guard “the body and blood” of (respectively) “the almighty (i.e., god)”, of “the beloved son,” and of “the holy spirit,” and then provides a narrative of an incident in the life of the Egyptian god Horus, in which he has fallen in love with a scorpion-like woman. And Hay no. 2 begins with a reference to the “favor that was given to the stone of King Solomon”–apparently his famous signet ring–which is apparently used in an erotic subjugation recipe that ends with a wish that equates the successful outcome of the spell with a long series of rather beautiful metaphors, e.g., “may I be as honey within her, manna on her tongue, and may she desire me like the sun and love me like the moon and cling to me like a drop of water that clings to a vessel.” The book, like most publications of the British Museum, is sumptuously produced with excellent photographs and illustrations.
The Hay Archive of Coptic Spells on Leather, moreover, participates in two recent and important developments in the research into ancient magic: a focus in the physical media of ancient magical texts and their conservation, e.g., those edited by Boschung and Bremmer (2015) or Martín Hernández and Torallas Tovar (2022); and an interest in handbooks as a genre and as a vehicle for transmitting knowledge from one generation to another and from one locale in the ancient world to another. The collaboration in this project of a multidisciplinary team reveals the benefit of such teamwork, of which one must highlight the redating of the Hay Archive from the sixth century CE date (proposed roughly a century ago) to the eighth or nineth and the revelation that the leather used for the archive was not cut from a single skin, but was assembled from the inferior and probably leftover bits of calf-, goat- and sheep-skins, and was poorly tanned in antiquity, all of which suggests that the archive was not produced by a professional copyist. Closer analysis of scribal hands, moreover, suggests that it was produced by at least four different scribes and perhaps over more than one generation and perhaps as a kind of generational archive within one family for local use in the area of Western Thebes. The new dates for its composition, moreover, place its composition and use in the time of Arab rule, a period which gives us more insight into the text itself.
The second chapter on the provenience and history of the Hay Collection at the Museum gives us insight into the life of Robert Hay, a Scotsman, who became obsessed with Egypt and who lived in Alexandria and eventually Thebes for long stretches in time, collecting antiquities in the charming world of European expats engaged in the same pursuits. Close archival work indicates, but does not prove, the long-suspected Theban provenience of the archive, a hypothesis that fits well with the use of leather and the dialect of Coptic used in the text, all of which leads to a good case for identifying the findspot more precisely at Deir el-Bakhit in Western Thebes. The third and fourth chapters are devoted to the scientific analyses of the leather, its conservation, and its re-mounting, studies that were crucial to the new assessment (mentioned earlier) of the date of the archive and of the inferior character of the leather medium and its tanning.
Michael Zellmann-Rohrer is rightly given pride of place as first author of this volume, because his contributions (chapters 5-7, roughly 120 pages) make up the bulk of this 200-page book. He is a young, but by now well-known scholar of both Greek and Coptic magical texts and the perfect choice for re-editing, translating, and annotating the seven different Coptic texts. The layout of the photographs and the edition with side-by-side translation makes for easy reading of the texts, although the lack of running heads in the catalogue (aside from the photos) makes it difficult to track down the many cross-references in the commentary. The commentary itself is pitched for readers well versed in the Coptic language, the latest version of the ancient Egyptian language, which in the late Roman period begins to be written down with a modified version of the Greek alphabet. But for the uninitiated, Zellmann-Rohrer adds two excellent essays to the end of the volume (chapters 6 and 7), the first of which treats the texts more generally as the coherent archive of a perhaps family of ritual practitioners, who lived under Arab rule in Western Thebes, who were literate, but not clergy, who offered recipes that generally aim at healing disease, at solving interpersonal problems with curses, or at ameliorating a man’s sex life or business prospects. The second essay expands this tight chronological frame to situate the Hay Archive in a history of ancient and medieval magic practiced in Egypt.
Works Cited:
D. Boschung and J. N. Bremmer, eds. 2015. The Materiality of Magic. Paderborn: W. Think.
R. Martín Hernández and S. Torallas Tovar, eds. 2022. TheMateriality of Greek and Roman
Curse Tablets: Technological Advances. Chicago: Oriental Institute.
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[Review length: 963 words • Review posted on June 7, 2023]