BBC: In pictures: 'Magical bowls' among relics seized in Jerusalem

[abqtommy]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-60571616

>Hundreds of ancient artefacts, including bowls decorated with "spells", have been found by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Israeli police in a raid on the home of a suspected illegal dealer in Jerusalem.<

This photo gallery presents interesting views of pottery, coins and other items dating
back to 500AD and 800-900 BC.

[Donkees]

1. Aramaic incantation bowls...

Excerpt:

Late-antique Mesopotamia was religiously and linguistically diverse. Most of the population, including Christians, Manichaeans and those who still followed the ancient Babylonian religion, used a dialect of Aramaic known as Syriac. The Mandaeans, a small, Gnostic religious community whose members have now mostly fled Iraq, had their own, closely related Aramaic dialect. So did the Jews, a longstanding minority whose presence, the Bible tells us, goes back to the Judean exiles first deported to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century BC. The region, an important province of the Iranian Sasanian empire, whose capital was located near present-day Baghdad, was also home to Persian-speaking Zoroastrians.

Though written by Jewish scribes, many of the clients of the Jewish Aramaic bowls were not themselves Jews. Mahdukh, daughter of Newandukh, for instance, has a typically Zoroastrian name: Mahdukh means ‘daughter of the Moon’, a Zoroastrian deity, and Newandukh is Persian for ‘daughter of the brave’. Other bowls were made for clients with similar names, including Ispendarmed, the Zoroastrian goddess of the Earth; Burznai, meaning ‘high’ or ‘elevated’; and Gushnasp, the name of a sacred Zoroastrian fire.

But the interest in foreign magic went in more than one direction; Jews, including rabbis, purchased bowls from non-Jewish scribes. ‘Everyone goes to everyone,’ said Gideon Bohak, an expert on ancient religion at Tel Aviv University. ‘You visit healers and magicians who are from different religious and social traditions. It’s something that happens all the time, partially because the neighbour’s grass is always greener; the neighbour’s magic is always more powerful.’

https://aeon.co/essays/what-should-be-done-with-the-magic-bowls-of-jewish-babylonia

[zanana1]

2. It's history come alive.

I'm fascinated by relics that have been hidden for thousands of years. I try to picture the lives of the people there at that time.