Magical Text, Romano-Egyptian, AD 200–250; found in Thebes, Egypt, papyrus and ink
Trustees of the British Museum, London, EA 10070, 2
Transcript
Female Narrator: Egyptologist Jacco Dieleman wrote an entire book about this long, densely-scripted bilingual papyrus manuscript. Why?
Jacco Dieleman: Because I was intrigued by the question of who, in a world where literacy rates were so low, was able to read and write in multiple languages.
Female Narrator: The papyrus, written mostly in the contemporary Egyptian language, Demotic, and also the older Hieratic handwriting, contains magical texts thought to affect the world of gods and demons.
[Mysterious, magical music with ancient reeds fades in]
Jacco Dieleman: The Egyptian who did this was highly trained and a true intellectual. And I wanted to figure out, what kind of person it must have been. What was his religious background? How did he interact with these foreign languages? How did he view them?
Female Narrator: The manuscript is sort of a one-stop shop for magical solutions to all kinds of problems.
Jacco Dieleman: Recipes for consultation with the gods to ask them about the future, for attracting a lover, for separating lovers, for killing or blinding an opponent. But also for healing – eye disease, from migraines and also when you have a bone stuck in your throat.
The scribe who put this anthology of recipes together understood that incantations are only effective in their original language and therefore he did not translate the Greek incantations.
Female Narrator: He did translate the instructions as to how to use the spells…
Jacco Dieleman: …from Greek into Egyptian…
Female Narrator: This papyrus was inscribed during the Roman period, when Egypt was part of the Roman Empire and...
Jacco Dieleman: …really a melting pot of cultures and languages. And this manuscript reflects this, because it is not just written in Egyptian Demotic, but it includes a few incantations in the Greek alphabet and it even includes an incantation in what is allegedly Meroitic, that is, the language of Sudan.
And so we are dealing here with a very unique individual, who was able to take it all together and make something new out of it: something that is both old and new, both international and local.
[Music fades]