Coordination Funds

在现代学术中被贴上“神奇”标签的文本，在西亚和地中海东部所有古代文化的文字遗产中占有突出地位，是古代宗教史和思想的关键来源。虽然“魔术”的概念一段时间以来一直被认为是有问题的，但这个术语本身仍然被有效地使用，指的是涉及表演各种类型的变革性仪式的可比的文化习俗。对西方文化中魔术历史的考察现在经常包括，与格雷科-罗马世界并列展示来自古埃及和美索不达米亚的魔术经文，作为对古代晚期和后古代欧洲形成的传统的最早影响。然而，这些手册和会议卷在很大程度上反映了学科的竖井，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、相互作用和类比相似之处的问题没有被调查，语料库之间的相互关系仍然很少被理解。高级研究中心为满足这一愿望提供了理想的形式，Mageia将作为一个学术论坛，结合对古代魔法文本传统和相关来源的语言学和比较研究。它将促进不同哲学以及宗教史、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，这项工作将集中在三个研究领域：(1)古代近东、埃及和邻近地区魔法文本传统的跨学科和比较研究。(2)对与魔法文本传统相关的做法和概念的主位术语的文献学和比较研究。(3)为不同古代语言的魔法文本的比较分析和呈现开发了一种注释方法。PIS和他们的团队将成为维尔茨堡大学Mageia的学术和机构骨干。专门研究古代魔术的初级和高级学者的研究员方案将确保研究来自古代西亚、埃及和古罗马世界的代表性来源样本。这些研究员将通过贡献不同的研究设计、方法、数据类型和学科视角来丰富Mageia的论述。Mageia将开发文本分析方法和跨文化比较模型，将古代魔术的研究提高到一个新的水平，并推动关于从公元前三千年到古代晚期西亚和地中海东部地区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.