The Greek Magical Papyri: history of a collection from Roman Egypt

Scholars use the abbreviation PGM, from the Latin Papyri Graecae Magicae, for a body of magical texts written in Greek on papyrus in Egypt under the Ptolemies and then under Rome. The oldest documents date to the second century BC, but most belong between the third and fifth centuries AD. This is not a single book: there are rolls, codices and loose sheets, some very long, some reduced to a few lines, preserving invocations, hymns, amulets and ritual prescriptions.

A world of mingled cultures

The most striking feature of the papyri is their religious variety. Alongside Greek gods such as Apollo, Hermes and Hecate appear Egyptian deities like Thoth, Osiris, Isis and Seth, names drawn from the Jewish tradition such as Iao, Sabaoth and Adonai, and angelic figures. This mixture reflects the society of Alexandria and the towns of Roman Egypt, where Greek-speaking priests, scribes and intellectuals lived in close contact with the native temples.

The texts also contain the so-called voces magicae, long strings of syllables with no apparent meaning, and charaktêres, graphic signs belonging to no alphabet. Famous words such as Abrasax recur, along with palindromic formulas. For the ancients these elements were valuable precisely because they were incomprehensible: they were considered the secret language in which one addressed the divine powers.

From discovery to editions

Many papyri reached Europe during the nineteenth century through the antiquities trade, above all through the sales of the diplomat Giovanni Anastasi. They ended up in Leiden, London, Paris, Berlin and other collections. Among the first scholars to publish them were Conrad Leemans for the Leiden papyri and Carl Wessely, who in 1888 printed the great papyri of Paris and London.

The fundamental work remains that of the German philologist Karl Preisendanz, whose two volumes appeared in Leipzig in 1928 and 1931. The third volume, with the indexes, was destroyed during the Second World War, when the printing works were hit. A revised second edition, edited by Albert Henrichs, appeared in the 1970s. In 1986 Hans Dieter Betz coordinated an English translation that also included the demotic papyri.

Why they matter to the historian

The PGM are one of the few sources in which ancient magic speaks in the first person, without the filter of hostile authors who condemned it. They show how ritual specialists worked, which gods they invoked and which everyday problems they addressed: love, health, business, protection from demons, knowledge of the future. They also reveal the close kinship between magic, temple religion and the philosophy of the age.

It should be remembered that the modern collection is partly artificial. Under the PGM label scholars gathered texts of very different dates, hands and functions: professional handbooks of many pages next to single amulets written for one particular person. More recent scholars therefore stress the need to read each papyrus in its material context rather than as a chapter of a single book.

Today the magical papyri are read by philologists, historians of religion and Egyptologists as evidence of a living, multilingual culture. The numbering introduced by Preisendanz, with Roman numerals such as PGM IV or PGM XIII, is still the one used worldwide. Anyone who meets these abbreviations in the notes of a book knows that behind each lies a specific manuscript, with its own history of discovery, sale and study.