Conference Paper

The pro­posed pa­per aims to pro­vide fur­ther com­ment on a re­cently pub­lished mag­i­cal gem housed in the Museo Arche­o­logico Nazionale del­l’Um­bria (Pe­ru­gia, Italy). The gem, show­ing Her­manu­bis bless­ing a corpse which is prob­a­bly that of the dead Osiris, can be clearly recog­nised as a phy­lac­tery against pos­ses­sion thanks to the in­scrip­tion on its rim. A com­par­i­son of the gem’s text and im­age with the rit­u­als de­scribed in the Greek mag­i­cal pa­pyri, as well as with other gem­stone amulets, will be the start­ing point for re­con­struct­ing the rit­ual tra­di­tion sur­round­ing the cre­ation of this kind of amulets, as well as the pop­u­lar be­liefs un­der­ly­ing their use. The pa­per will also in­ves­ti­gate the re­la­tion­ship among medium, im­age and text, as well as that be­tween the in­scribed text and the mag­i­cal for­mu­lae in the pa­pyri. The epi­graphic fea­tures will also be dis­cussed, in­clud­ing those re­gard­ing the mag­i­cal sym­bols (charak­têres) en­graved on the amulet.