Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies: Text and Translation, Vol. 1

"The magical formularies on papyrus are precious witnesses to practices and processes of cultural transmission: i.e. the creation, communication, transformation and preservation of knowledge, both in text and image, across history. More than eighty such handbooks survive, some of them in a fragmentary state. This volume, the first of two, is the work of an international team of papyrologists and historians of magic and presents fifty-four of the earlier handbooks or their fragments, spanning the period from second century BCE to third century CE, in a new edition which includes the original texts in the three languages (Greek, Demotic, Coptic) with a full material description and a facing translation with commentary"--