Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual, 100-300 CE (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World) Review

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(More customer reviews)Dr. Dieleman's book is a must read for those scholars seriously wishing to understand the mental climate of Roman Graeco-Egypt. It gives the first competent treatment of Graeco-Egyptian magical texts from the perspective of the late Egyptian priesthood pandering to the new market realities of Roman Egypt, wherein the priesthood had to rely on its own resources from tourism, magical services and furtherance of maintaining the knowledge of the ancient learning.
It is scholarship at the highest level of mental cultre, yet its prose style is readable, pleasant and inviting. It is well-worth its mere $144.00 price tag. One will learn that there has been little change in religious matters over the last 17 centuries---furthermore, it will reveal how much Christianity owes to the dupery of an ancient priesthood preserving its Egyptian culture from the vulgar Greeks. Christianity did not so much destroy Egyptian religious culture as assimmilate its most ancient rituals, rites and magical practicies!
John E.D.P. Malin
Informatica Corporate
P. O. Drawer 460
Cecilia, Louisiana 70521-0460

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This book is an investigation into the sphere of production and use of two related bilingual magical handbooks found as part of a larger collection of magical and alchemical manuscripts around 1828 in the hills surrounding Luxor, Egypt. Both handbooks, dating to the Roman period, contain an assortment of recipes for magical rites in the Demotic and Greek language. The library which comprises these two handbooks is nowadays better known as the Theban Magical Library.The book traces the social and cultural milieu of the composers, compilers and users of the extant spells through a combination of philology, sociolinguistics and cultural analysis. To anybody working on Greco-Roman Egypt, ancient magic, and bilingualism this study is of significant importance.Readership: All those interested in ancient magic, social and cultural history of Greco-Roman Egypt, bilingualism, intellectual history, as well as Egyptologists, classicists, historians of religion.

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