The demotic magical papyri and the London-Leiden papyrus

Alongside the Greek papyri, Roman Egypt left magical texts written in demotic, the late cursive form of the Egyptian language used for documents, contracts and literature from the seventh century BC onwards. Scholars refer to them as PDM, Papyri Demoticae Magicae. They are fewer than the Greek papyri but precious, because they show Egyptian magic in its original language, in the last phase of temple civilisation.

A manuscript divided between two museums

The most important is the so-called London-Leiden Magical Papyrus, datable to the third century AD. It too came from the collections of Giovanni Anastasi and was split into two parts that ended up in different museums: one in the British Museum, the other in the museum of antiquities at Leiden. Only in the nineteenth century did scholars realise that the two fragments belonged to the same roll, several metres long and written on both sides.

The standard edition was published between 1904 and 1909 by Francis Llewellyn Griffith and Herbert Thompson, under the title The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden. Their work made legible an extremely difficult text, full of rare terms, divine names and passages written in different scripts. It was an undertaking that required years of comparison between the two halves of the roll.

Three scripts in a single roll

The papyrus is an extraordinary example of scripts living side by side. The main text is in demotic, but some parts are in Greek and many words are accompanied by glosses in Old Coptic, that is, Egyptian written in Greek letters with some additional signs. The glosses served to fix the exact pronunciation of divine names and words of power, which in vowelless demotic would have remained ambiguous.

Cipher signs also appear, used to hide particular words from the eyes of the uninitiated. This detail shows how much the scribes cared about keeping their knowledge private. The Old Coptic glosses are moreover an important source for the history of the Egyptian language, because they document the stage preceding the birth of Christian literary Coptic.

Divination and the world of the temples

Many sections of the papyrus concern divination: techniques for obtaining visions or answers from the gods, often with the help of a lamp or a surface of water, and sometimes with a boy as medium. Other parts deal with love, protection and the treatment of bites. The deities invoked are mainly Egyptian, such as Anubis, Osiris and Isis, but names of Greek and Semitic origin are not lacking.

Scholars believe the authors were priests or scribes linked to the temples, able to read ancient texts and adapt them to a new clientele. In the English translation of the magical papyri coordinated by Hans Dieter Betz in 1986, the demotic texts were published alongside the Greek ones, confirming that they belonged to the same milieu.

The demotic magical papyri remind us that the magic of Roman Egypt was not a purely Greek phenomenon. It was rooted in a tradition thousands of years old, which went on expressing itself in the language of the pharaohs just as the world around it was changing. To read them is to hear the last written voice of the Egyptian temples before their silence.