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Graeco-Roman magical practice adopted the use of clay or wax dolls in curses or love spells probably
from Egypt. Figurines outside Egypt were made mostly of lead or bronze. Wax statuettes from the
Anna Perenna fountain prove that the practice was present also in Europe, but items of wax could
survive only under special circumstances. The seven dolls from Rome are peculiar, because they
were all moulded around a piece of bone. This paper investigates the possible Egyptian origins of
this practice.
Keywords: magic dolls; wax dolls; Graeco-Egyptian magic; Anna Perenna; bones
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Studies
of Egyptian Late Period statuary often assume that the extant corpus is
a representative sample of the artistic output of the Twenty-Sixth to
Thirty-First Dynasties (c. 664–332 BCE). This assumption ignores the
various human processes that affect the survival of statues after their
initial dedication. In particular, the Roman practice of collecting
Egyptian naophorous statues for reuse in cult spaces of Egyptian gods in
Italy has skewed the chronological distribution of the corpus in favour
of statues of Twenty-Sixth Dynasty date. This in turn informs
perceptions of the...
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What
are the possible roots of funerary texts beyond the well-known temple
liturgies? Shouldn't we acknowledge the rites around the king as further
sources? If the answer is 'yes', the varied and rich corpus of mortuary
texts from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods could turn out to preserve
fragments of rituals that have been otherwise lost. Looking at the
tradition from that perspective, the question arises whether the
dominant trend in Egyptology to interpret royal rituals from a funerary
perspective reverses the reality. This is exemplified by the discussion
of the sed-festival that has...
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