HEIDELBERG - With a collection of ancient Egyptian amulets, ancient texts in various languages and magical imagery and objects, 2,000 years of Egyptian magic are being on show now in the Museum of Heidelberg University. Once you enter the beautiful German city, the magic begins with enchanting sceneries all around, however, stepping into the museum area another sort of magic appears. “This exhibition provides prospects on an issue of great interest nowadays,” Prof. Rodney Ast, Research and Teaching Associate in the Institute of Papyrology, told The Egyptian Gazette during a tour of the exhibition. “We can see how the idea of magic intersected with love, relations, medicine and even with things that are beyond or bigger than human beings,” he added. The idea of ‘Egyptian Magic through the Ages' started in a class last summer about magic in ancient cultures. It took almost a year to prepare for the exhibition in which preparation eight students took part for the first time. A decade-long-lost book of spells from ancient Egypt is the focus of the joint exhibition that's organised by both the Institute of Papyrology and the Institute of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg. The valuable book that is called ‘The Magical Book of Michael' was lost after the end of Second World War and was only returned last year, triggering the idea of this exhibition, according to Ast. Magical objects, imagery and texts are exhibited in six cabinets, each of which carries a distinctive theme. In the first cabinet, different kinds of amulets, magical gems and texts for ‘Protective Magic', which were used to fight evil spirits, are displayed. In another cabinet, a pharaonic statue is exhibited alongside with a small model of a woman and a tuft of hair: this is the cabinet for ‘binding and lover-related magic'. The texts show that these amulets and spells were used to provide love-saturated relationships and to assure the love of the partner through times and times. “Love and healing, protection and loss have been for thousands of years the recurring themes,” explained the director of the Institute of Papyrology, Prof. Andrea Joerdens, adding that the exhibition gathered ancient Egyptian magical symbols with ancient Near Eastern, Jewish and Christian symbols. Then comes ‘magic and medicine' cabinet, which shows some of the ancient tools used in healing or preparing healing magical works. It also shows part of an ancient Egyptian amulet that was used to keep scorpions away and a modern illustration. Another object is the evil eye that is said to dispel bad spirits and keeps someone healthy. “This part describes how medicine and magic have always been connected together over ages,” Ast said, adding that some of the objects and the texts were studied and analysed by the institute's students while others were yet to be understood. The majority of texts in those departments are of ancient Coptic Language, and hieroglyphics; yet, the next cabinet has the majority of its texts in Arabic language. Its theme is ‘imagery and text' and in this cabinet we see a variety of Arabic amulets or the hegab as it's called in Arabic. It also includes some verses from Islam's Holy Qur'an that were used in protective and preventive magic in more recent eras. The majority of objects displayed in the exhibition are the property of Heidelberg University. However, some special objects are originally a property of the Heidelberg Museum and are just displayed in the exhibition because of their direct relation to the theme. This is just the case with the pharaonic Child's mummy sarcophagus that had magical writings asking gods to save the spirit of the child, which has a special cabinet for its own. The final cabinet in the exhibition, which runs until June 13, is the one that features texts from several magical books that cover the span of 2,000 years from ancient pharaonic to Coptic, including texts from the Magical Book of Michael. “What fascinates me in this exhibition is that it shows us how much similarities were there in the fears and desires among different ancient cultures,” said Ast, who has been working in excavations in Egyptian oases for a while now. “It also shows us how similarly things were handled through ages.” With its wide time span, rich collection of amulets and gems, texts and imagery and magical objects, ‘Egyptian Magic through the Ages' provides an insight that overpasses geographical or physical measurement and opens a door to a world, in which much more is yet to be revealed.
