Incantation bowl

Common card · No. 326535

Incantation bowls are a form of protective magic found in what is now Iraq and Iran. Produced in the Middle East during late antiquity from the sixth to eighth centuries, particularly in Upper Mesopotamia and Syria, the bowls were usually inscribed in a spiral, beginning from the rim and moving toward the center. Most are inscribed in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. Scholar John Charles Arnold states the bowls were used as such: "When placed upside down under each corner of a house, demons would follow the inscribed charms that spiraled from the outer rim inward, only to be caught in the center." They were commonly placed under the threshold, courtyards, in the corner of the homes of the recently deceased and in cemeteries. The majority of Mesopotamia's population were either Christian, Manichaean, Mandaean, Jewish, or adherents of the ancient Babylonian religion, all of whom spoke Aramaic dialects by the end of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Zoroastrians who spoke Persian also lived here...

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