The Aramaic magic bowls of Sasanian Mesopotamia

In Mesopotamia during the Sasanian period, between the fifth and seventh centuries AD, an unusual magical object became widespread: a simple earthenware bowl with a text written on the inside, winding in a spiral from the rim towards the centre. Scholars call them Aramaic magic bowls, or incantation bowls. Several thousand are known, and they are the main witness to everyday magic in the region on the eve of the Arab conquest.

The Nippur discoveries

The first bowls to catch the attention of scholars were those found in the University of Pennsylvania's excavations at Nippur, in present-day Iraq, at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1913 James Alan Montgomery published a selection of these texts in the volume Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur, which long remained the standard work. The bowls had been found in domestic contexts, often upside down beneath the floors of houses.

In recent decades the number of known bowls has grown enormously, but many examples have reached the antiquities market without excavation data. This has posed problems of method and ethics for scholars, because the loss of archaeological context makes it impossible to know where and how the objects were used. Regularly excavated examples therefore remain the most valuable for research.

Languages, scripts and communities

The bowls are written in various forms of Aramaic. Most use Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, the language of the Babylonian Talmud; others are in Syriac or in Mandaic, the religious language of the Mandaean community. Some are in Middle Persian, and there are also examples with imitation scripts by scribes who could not read, a sign of a production in high demand.

The names of the clients show that the bowls were not reserved for a single religion. Alongside Jewish names appear Persian, Christian and Mandaean ones, often within the same family. The scribes, who might belong to a different community from their clients, used shared formulas and adapted the religious references. The bowls thus reveal a plural society in which protection from demons was a common need.

Demons, Lilith and bills of divorce

The declared purpose of the bowls was to protect the house and its inhabitants from demons, illness, the evil eye and night spirits. Among the most feared figures were the liliths, female demons associated with the figure of Lilith, believed dangerous to women in childbirth and to newborns. Many bowls also contain drawings of demons bound or chained, traced at the centre of the spiral.

A distinctive feature of some texts is the use of legal language. The bowls present the expulsion of demons as an act of divorce, similar to the document by which a husband repudiated his wife under Jewish law. The name of Yehoshua bar Perahya recurs, an ancient sage whom tradition presented as the author of a divorce imposed on the demons.

The Aramaic magic bowls allow us to enter the houses of late antique Mesopotamia and see the fears and hopes of ordinary families. They are witnesses close in time and place to the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud and to the religious culture of Sasanian Iran. Their study, still developing rapidly, continues to reveal forgotten names, formulas and figures.