Coordination Funds

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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.