Sometime during the first century and a half after the Arab Conquest of Egypt, Egyptian scribes salvaged at least seven leather offcuts made from larger skins of cattle, goats, and sheep. Despite their odd shapes and imperfections, the scribes covered these scraps with texts and drawings on both sides, executed in black ink made from charcoal. These “scrap paper” texts were written not in the Greek of Egypt's Hellenistic or Byzantine past, nor the Arabic of the Islamic society just beginning to rise, but in the Indigenous Egyptian language called Coptic. Like the miracle-working magic described in their contents, these seven humble scraps of hide survived into the nineteenth century and ended up in the possession of Robert Hay, a wandering Scottish noble, whose son sold them to the British Museum in 1868. Initially overlooked but eventually conserved and published in the 1930s using techniques including infrared technology, these seven leather manuscripts, today known as the Hay Archive, were mounted between glass plates and stored away.Between 2011 and 2017, prior to another round of conservation, an extraordinary and diverse group of scholars from both traditional and digital humanities as well as multiple scientific disciplines ranging from animal genetic studies to radiocarbon dating to museum conservation came together to take advantage of an opportunity for interdisciplinary research. According to Elisabeth O'Connell, publication editor and lead researcher: This volume brings together a multi-disciplinary team of experts to demonstrate how collaborative and interdisciplinary research, made possible through institutions and subject-specialist networks, can transform our understanding of what may otherwise look like ragged strips of animal hide. (p. v)The Hay Archive of Coptic Spells on Leather is an oversized museum catalog featuring full-page, full-color photographs of the seven Hay manuscripts alongside various aspects of research and interpretation. It is an exemplar in whatever field one wishes to attribute it to, whether archaeology, papyrology, conservation, Coptology/studies in Late Antique or early Islamic Egypt, the folkloric study of magical and/or religious texts, or simply a testament to the power of academic collaboration. It is truly interdisciplinary, featuring chapters by experts in very different areas, all speaking about the same artifacts but in ways that complement and expand each other's research.As readers, we learn not only about the material nature of the manuscripts (where they may have come from, when they were written and who wrote them, how and why they were created, etc.), but also how they relate to each other and to other similar texts. The book's highlight is a detailed analysis in chapter 5 of each of the seven Hay manuscripts by papyrologist Michael Zellmann-Rohrer, which presents the publication of two of these manuscripts, Hay 3 and Hay 7, for the first time.Chapter 5 will likely command the attention of readers interested in magic, folklore, religion, or late antique and medieval Egyptian culture. It contains detailed descriptions of a mythical world where ancient Egyptian gods combine with the angels and demonic beings of non-Egyptian cultures and religions, including Christianity, in magical workings for blessing, cursing, and even sexual domination. Reproduced drawings of magical figures and symbols appear at the exact places where they occur in the original manuscripts, so readers need not flip back to the photographs to understand context. After the annotated translations, Zellman-Rohrer provides line-by-line commentary and notes concerning the contents of each text, defining their various magical beings, ritual words, and descriptions, in addition to commentary on grammar or language, as one expects from a philological study.Those interested in magic or ritual studies will also appreciate chapter 1, where O'Connell summarizes the ways magic practices were understood and explains how texts containing magic recipes were created in late antique Egypt. This chapter reinforces that the Hay Archive contains one of the rarest kinds of extant Egyptian magical texts, because they were written on leather rather than on a papyrus scroll or in a parchment codex. O'Connell makes the case that the Hay Archive was not a professional document collection in the sense that it was created for a wealthy patron, nor was it to be used as an official text in a formal setting like a monastery. Rather, it likely represents an opportunistic collection made by a magician and/or his associates for a sort of “cookbook” of magical recipes. Another manuscript, Hay 6, was folded into 24 squares, unlike the other six, which were rolled. Hay 6 may represent either an example of a working amulet made using instructions from the other manuscripts or it is a sample amulet created as a teaching tool.In chapter 6, Zellman-Rohrer expands his translation work from chapter 5 into a detailed analysis of the cultural, magical, and religious content of the manuscripts and its implications for their creators and users. He follows with a third essay in chapter 7, which situates the Hay Archive into its historical context as one of the latest-dated collections of medieval magical texts in Egypt. Chapter 7 also explains how the Coptic language and Egypt's multicultural environment just before and after the Arab Conquest influenced the creation of such texts by Egyptian insiders as a response to various factors, such as life under conquest and a regional shift away from polytheistic religious practices to monotheistic Christian and Muslim theologies.While this book answers many questions and offers compelling theories, it also provides room for more questions and research, not just for the Hay Archive, but for the study of any manuscript. The Hay Archive of Coptic Spells on Leather sets a new standard for manuscript studies. I consider it as a best-practice model. Like the scribes who took the opportunity to salvage seven scraps of leather and turn them into a magical archive more than a millennium ago, the scholars involved in The Hay Archive of Coptic Spells on Leather have surely managed to make the best of their opportunity. The benefits are only just beginning to be known.
Tamara L. Siuda (Thu,) studied this question.