---
title: "Relics of Syriac Magic — Moriggi 2024"
description: "The paper publishes, for the first time, two Syriac magical texts written on clay incantation bowls from late antique Mesopotamia."
authors: ["Marco Moriggi"]
year: 2024
venue: "Folia Orientalia 61"
source: "https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/743"
doi: "10.24425/for.2024.152391"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/moriggi-2024-relics-syriac-magic-another-syriac/"
---
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# Relics of Syriac Magic: Another Syriac Bowl for Prwkzʿd br Kwmy and a Syriac Incantation Fragment in the British Museum

**Authors:** Marco Moriggi · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** Folia Orientalia 61 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2024.152391) · [PDF](https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/download/743/561) · [DOI 10.24425/for.2024.152391](https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2024.152391) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4408620354)

**Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper publishes, for the first time, two Syriac magical texts written on clay incantation bowls from late antique Mesopotamia. The first is a complete bowl auctioned at Christie's in 1974 whose current location is unknown. Moriggi reads it from a single poor-quality catalogue photograph. He gives a transliteration, a translation and philological notes. He identifies the bowl as a new version of a known protective spell and links it to one client, Prwkzʿd son of Kwmy (Farrokhzād son of Kumay). That client commissioned many bowls in Syriac, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Mandaic. The second text is a small sherd in the British Museum that was left out of the 2000 catalogue as part of a divorce bill. The author compares its surviving words with parallel spells and argues that it more likely belongs to the "demonic egg" dispute formula. The study shows that editing parallel versions of a spell lets scholars rebuild damaged texts and correct earlier mislabelling.

## Key points
- Bowl 1 was sold as lot 348 at Christie's 'Hera' auction in London in July 1974. It measures 18.8 cm in diameter and holds nine lines of Estrangela script, spiralling clockwise from the centre. Lines 1–3 cannot be read.
- Its parallels are bowls no. 47 (IM 142513) and no. 48 (IBC 2) in Moriggi 2014, plus unpublished pieces to be edited by Ford. Unlike its parallels, this version names the client's sons and daughters as protected, and it leaves out the seal "in which is everything."
- The scribe dots rēsh above and dālat below, which lets the reader tell zayn and dālat apart in the client's name. The scribe also added a missed wāw above the line in Kwmy.
- Fragment 2 is 1908-4-15,24 (BM 117877), about 8 × 9 cm, with traces of eleven lines. Its script resembles Syriac bowls nos. 11 and 46. Bowl no. 11 was acquired in Najaf, so the sherd may come from near the Dukakin Caves.
- The fragment's vocabulary matches the egg-versus-sorcerer dispute found in bowl no. 46 (VABab 4167-I-5) and in the Mandaic bowl MS 2054/124. None of these words appear in known divorce texts, so the "bill of divorce" label is rejected.

## Interesting ideas
- Spells copied from a shared template for different clients are aligned against each other, so the better-preserved copies fill gaps in a damaged one. — For Mova (learn): Treat several paraphrased or near-duplicate versions of a sentence as witnesses, and use their agreement to repair a noisy parse or fill a missing argument.
- Variants of the same formula are compared slot by slot, which exposes exactly where a version adds or drops something (added beneficiaries, a missing seal clause). — For Mova (frames): Diff the frames of parallel texts role by role, so a change in who benefits or what is omitted is reported explicitly rather than lost in overall similarity.
- Look-alike letters are told apart by small diacritic habits of the particular scribe, such as where the dot sits. — For Mova (tokens): Learn per-source orthographic habits as features for resolving ambiguous tokens, such as OCR confusions or house spelling styles.
- An old genre label is tested by checking whether the surviving words fit the vocabulary profile of that genre; here the divorce texts share none of them. — For Mova (learn): Use genre-vocabulary profiles as a negative control when auditing silver labels or document classifications that were inherited without review.
- The edition marks every reading with a certainty level (restored, partial, uncertain, scribal omission, superfluous letter). — For Mova (world): Attach a provenance and confidence tag to each entity or state in the world model, separating what was read directly from what was inferred from parallels, which keeps answers explainable.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{moriggi2024relics,
  title = {{Relics of Syriac Magic: Another Syriac Bowl for Prwkzʿd br Kwmy and a Syriac Incantation Fragment in the British Museum}},
  author = {Moriggi, Marco},
  booktitle = {Folia Orientalia 61},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.24425/for.2024.152391},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2024.152391}
}
```

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## References

17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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