KFG 42: MagEIA: Magic between Entanglement, Interaction, and Analogy – Centre for the study of magical text traditions of West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean in antiquity

在现代学术中，被称为“神奇”的文本在西亚和东地中海所有古代文化的书面遗产中占有突出地位，是古代宗教和思想历史的重要来源。虽然“魔法”的概念在一段时间内被认为是有问题的，但这个术语本身继续被有效地应用于涉及各种类型的变革性仪式表演的可比文化实践。现在，对西方文化中魔法历史的调查通常包括，与希腊罗马世界并列的，来自古埃及和美索不达米亚的魔法文本，作为对古代晚期和后古代欧洲发展的传统的最早影响。然而，这些手册和会议卷在很大程度上反映了学科的竖井，并没有涉及跨文化的通信和关系。关于不同传统魔法文本之间的纠缠、相互作用和相似之处的问题尚未得到调查，语料库之间的相互关系仍然知之甚少。高级研究中心为解决这一问题提供了理想的形式，MagEIA将作为一个学术论坛，结合古代魔法文本传统和相关来源的语言学和比较研究。它将促进不同文献学、宗教史、人类学和考古学之间的持续合作。MagEIA的研究目标将分两个主要阶段展开，每个阶段为期四年。在第一阶段，工作将集中在三个研究领域：(1)对古代近东、埃及和邻近地区的魔法文本传统进行跨学科和比较研究。(2)对与魔法文本传统相关的实践和概念的专有术语进行语言学和比较研究。(3)开发了一种用于比较分析和呈现不同古代语言魔法文本的注释方法。这些pi和他们的团队将构成维尔茨堡大学MagEIA的学术和机构支柱。专为研究古代魔法的初级和高级学者设立的研究员项目将确保研究来自古西亚、埃及和希腊罗马世界的有代表性的资料样本。研究员将通过贡献不同的研究设计、方法、数据类型和学科观点来丰富MagEIA的话语。MagEIA将开发文本分析方法和跨文化比较模型，将古代魔法研究提升到一个新的水平，并促进从公元前三千年到古代晚期西亚和东地中海的知识传播和文本传播的研究。

Texts labeled as ‘magical’ in modern scholarship figure prominently in the written legacy of all ancient cultures in West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, presenting a key source for the history of religions and ideas in antiquity. Whereas the concept of ‘magic’ has for some time been recognized as problematic, the term itself continues to be employed productively with reference to comparable cultural practices that involve the performance of transformative rituals of various types. Surveys of the history of magic in Western cultures now routinely include, side by side with the Graeco-Roman world, presentations of the magical texts from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia as the earliest influences on the traditions that evolved in Late Antique and post-antique Europe. These handbooks and conference volumes, however, largely reflect disciplinary silos and refrain from addressing cross-cultural correspondences and relations. Questions regarding the entanglement, interactions, and analogical parallels between the different traditions of magical texts are left uninvestigated, and the mutual relationship between the corpora remains poorly understood. A Centre for Advanced Studies provides the ideal format for addressing this desideratum, and MagEIA will serve as an academic forum for the combination of philological and comparative research on ancient magical text traditions and related sources. It will foster the sustained collaboration between different philologies as well as history of religions, anthropology, and archaeology. The research objectives of MagEIA will unfold in two major phases of four years each. In phase one, the work will focus on three research areas: (1) The interdisciplinary and comparative study of magical text traditions of the ancient Near East, Egypt, and neighbouring regions. (2) Philological and comparative research into the emic terminologies for practices and concepts associated with magical text traditions. (3) The development of an annotation method for the comparative analysis and presentation of magical texts in different ancient languages. The PIs and their teams will form the academic and institutional backbone of MagEIA at the University of Würzburg. The fellows programme for junior and senior scholars who specialize in the study of magic in antiquity will ensure that a representative sample of sources from ancient West Asia, Egypt, and the Graeco-Roman world will be studied. The fellows will enrich MagEIA’s discourse by contributing different research designs, methods, types of data, and disciplinary perspectives. MagEIA will develop methodologies of text analysis and models of cross-cultural comparison that will take the study of magic in antiquity to a new level and stimulate research on the diffusion of knowledge and transmission of texts in West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean from the third millennium BCE to Late Antiquity.