Haupt Lecture: Sorcery in the Soil: Finding Magic at Graeco-Roman Karanis in Egypt

NOTICE: Admission to the ISAW Lecture Hall closes 10 minutes after the 6:30pm scheduled start time

--Reception to follow

We often imagine magic around every corner of the ancient village: old women who curl fingers around thumbs to avoid the evil eye, ill townspeople seeking out spells and cures from the local wise woman at the edge of town, or ne’er do-wells enchanting young girls with more than their good looks. Indeed, individuals in the ancient world frequently employed magic to achieve solutions to everyday problems as well as unusual crises. Situating magic in the local community proves a greater challenge. By integrating the study of archaeological objects, their contexts and documentary sources, it is possible to reconstruct and understand magic rituals as part of a lived environment. This lecture will focus on archaeological evidence from the Graeco-Roman site of Karanis in Egypt to identify and interpret two groups of magical objects: a burned figurine intended to compel the love of a victim, and a cache of painted bones deposited for mysterious reasons.

Drew Wilburn (Andrew T. Wilburn) is Chair of Archaeological Studies and Irvin E. Houck Associate Professor in the Humanities at Oberlin College. His research focuses on the archaeology of ancient magic in the Roman Mediterranean and village life in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Wilburn has excavated at a number of ancient sites in the Mediterranean, including the Athenian Agora, Corinth, Tel Kedesh and Caesarea in Israel, and Abydos in Egypt. In his book, Materia Magica: The Archaeology of Magic in Egypt, Spain and Cyprus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), Wilburn attempts to discover magic in the objects of daily life from antiquity by focusing on three sites in the Mediterranean—Karanis in Egypt, Amathous on Cyprus, and Empúries in Spain.