An Unpublished Syriac Bowl (B9002) with a Mandaic Incantation

Abstract This article presents a transcription, translation, and analysis of an unpublished Syriac incantation bowl (B9002) housed in the Penn Museum. Although the text is faded, multispectral imaging facilitated its successful decipherment. B9002 is a valuable addition to the relatively limited corpus of published Syriac incantation bowls and stands out for its distinctive content in two key respects. First, the incantation text has no known parallel among existing Syriac bowls. Second, while other Syriac bowls occasionally incorporate formulas that appear to derive from scribal traditions of different confessional groups, B9002 is exceptional in that it preserves an almost verbatim copy of a formula found on several published Mandaic bowls—including another in the Penn Museum’s collection. This striking intertextual relationship invites new considerations of cultural and ritual interaction in Late Antiquity.