The Babylonian Incantation Bowls

The bowls are ordinary domestic earthenware, and nothing about them was made for the purpose. What makes one an incantation bowl is that someone wrote on the inside in ink, in a spiral turning outward from the centre, and then buried it inverted under a floor, in a corner, at a threshold or beneath a doorway. The inversion is the point: the bowl is a trap, closed over what it holds.

The texts protect a household against a listed range of dangers. Demons, liliths, the evil eye, curses spoken by named or unnamed enemies, illness, and harm to children and to pregnancy recur throughout. Clients are named, often with a matronymic, which is why the corpus is evidence for the population of Sasanian Mesopotamia as much as for its magic: names in the bowls are Jewish, Christian, Mandaean, Zoroastrian and Persian, sometimes within one household.

They were written in three script traditions in use side by side across the same region and the same centuries, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic in square Hebrew letters, Syriac, and Mandaic. The formulary crosses between them. That is one of the most interesting facts in the corpus, because it means practitioners of different religious communities were drawing on shared material at a level where their communities were otherwise distinct.

The most striking single feature of the Jewish bowls is the use of the get, the writ of divorce, against a lilith. The lilith is treated as having attached herself to a household in the manner of a spouse, and the instrument used to remove her is the ordinary legal document by which a marriage is ended, in the proper form, with the formulae a court would recognise.

Nothing shows more clearly how this material understood what it was doing. The demon is not overpowered. She is dismissed, by a procedure that has standing, in language borrowed from the rabbinic courts. It assumes a world in which the same law binds humans and demons, and it makes the bowl an instrument of that law rather than an act of force against it. Similar borrowings from legal and administrative form run through the corpus.

The corpus also carries an unresolved scholarly and ethical problem, and it is a current one. Nippur, excavated by the University of Pennsylvania between 1888 and 1900 and published by James Montgomery in 1913, supplies the securely provenanced core. The great majority of bowls published since arrived through the antiquities market without findspot, much of it via private collections, and whether that material should be studied and published at all has been argued in print without agreement. It is not only an ethical question. A bowl without a findspot cannot be dated by context or located in a community, and much of what the corpus could otherwise tell us is lost with the provenance.