Blog

On the evening of Monday, 29 April, 2024 the members of the Centre for Ancient Studies of the Julius Maximilian University came together to celebrate the grand opening of the new DFG research group MagEIA. A great number of university members and interested guests packed the opulent Toskanasaal of the Würzburg Residence up to the galleries. 

The celebration was musically accompanied by Aktham Abou Fakher on the oud and Felix Schneider-Restschikow on the piano, who both created a magical atmosphere leading the audience from Western Europe to the Near East. Daniel Kölligan (Comparative Philology), one of the three Principal Investigators (PIs) of MagEIA, led through the evening’s programme.

In the beginning, MagEIA’s PI Martin Stadler (Egyptology) welcomed the guests, introduced the research group MagEIA, and explained how it came into existence – from the first idea to the acquisition of research funds. Then, additional greetings by Paul Pauli, the President of the University, and Thomas Baier, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, followed.

Afterwards, the first lecture was held by Daniel Schwemer (Ancient Near Eastern Studies), PI and speaker of MagEIA. His talk was titled “Between curse and promise. The challenged human being in the light of magical text traditions of the ancient cultures of the Near East and the Mediterranean region.” (German original title: „Zwischen Fluch und Verheißung. Der angefochtene Mensch im Licht magischer Texttraditionen aus den alten Kulturen Vorderasiens und des Mittelmeerraums“). 

He demonstrated how magical practices played a central role in people’s lives in the ancient civilizations of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. These practices are reflected in textual traditions whose study requires interdisciplinary collaboration between different fields like Egyptology, Assyriology, and Comparative Linguistics. This collaboration enables the understanding of the cultural significance and historical scope of these traditions without imposing on them Eurocentric concepts. One example of such magical practices is provided by the story of Bābu-ēṭirat, a young woman from Nippur in ancient Babylonia who suffered from a serious illness. An ancient specialist called āšipu – usually translated as “exorcist”, i.e. a practitioner of diagnosis and treatment – was summoned to help her. Preserved remains of an amulet attest to this crisis and its therapy. Originally, it consisted of linen cords, a leather pouch filled with plants, and especially, a cylinder seal inscribed with Akkadian incantations in cuneiform script, although only this last element actually survived in the archaeological record. Daniel Schwemer furthermore presented a particularly complex and lengthy ritual in the repertoire of the āšipu, called Bīt mēseri (“house of enclosure”), the first edition of which he is preparing during the first funding period of MagEIA. In the course of this ritual, the exorcist performed various actions and invocations during several days, and used a lamp as well as more than a hundred statues and depictions of deities and protective spirits in order to summon a whole mythological world to heal a sick person and cleanse the house. Thanks to the textual sources that inform us about the Bīt mēseri, the ritual procedure can be reconstructed in detail. Although we do not know whether it was successful or not, we can be certain that it changed the perspective of the affected family, who – if one wishes, thanks to an earlier form of psychotherapy – were now confident that they could face the hardships of human existence surrounded by good powers.

The second lecture of the evening was given by Beatrice Baragli (Ancient Near Eastern Studies) and Svenja Nagel (Egyptology), two postdoctoral researchers in the MagEIA research group. They presented a tandem paper under the name “Magical insurance of the ruler in life and death: Defense against demons, snakes and witches in Mesopotamia and Egypt” (German original title: „Magische Versicherung des Herrschers im Leben und im Tod: Abwehr von Dämonen, Schlangen und Hexen in Mesopotamien und Ägypten“). While Beatrice Baragli focused on the living king in Mesopotamia, Svenja Nagel illuminated the topic using the example of the deceased ruler in Egypt.

Beatrice Baragli spoke about the role of the king in Mesopotamia and how the ašipu was appointed to protect the king against evil forces. One of the most complex rituals by which he could protect the king was the Bīt rimki ritual, which means bathhouse, and is recorded on cuneiform tablets throughout the first millennium BCE. The Bīt rimki protected the king from dangers such as demons, witches, and human enemies, but also from the king's own transgressions. The ritual thus presents a picture of a vulnerable and fallible king, an unusual circumstance in ancient Near Eastern sources. The lecture also touched on the concept of the performative power of language, i.e. how magical language – like legal language – can have a direct effect on reality. After an introduction to the status of the Pharaoh during the Egyptian Old Kingdom (ca. 2700-2200 BCE), Svenja Nagel talked about the Pyramid Texts, which were first engraved in the inner chambers of King Unas’ pyramid in Saqqara at the end of the 5th Dynasty (ca. 2350 BCE). His successors followed this practice and chose similar, albeit individual, selections of such texts for their tomb chambers. The collection of hundreds of spells presents the earliest known corpus of religious and magical texts in written form. In particular, Svenja Nagel focused on the subgroup of apotropaic texts for the protection of the king in the afterlife, which forms her specific research interest within the MagEIA project. These spells are directed against dangerous beings, often snakes or serpentine demons, and contain many difficult, often even incomprehensible passages, some of which could perhaps be identified as “magical words” (like abracadabra) used to address these dangerous entities. Svenja Nagel gave some impressions of the particular language and writing of these texts and concluded the lectures with a summary of the different ancient people and magical techniques encountered in the course of the evening.

To round off the evening, the MagEIA research group invited the guests to a reception in the Martin von Wagner Museum. The grand opening was celebrated there with wine and delicious food inspired by the Near East and the Mediterranean.