Shaul Shaked

"The corpus of Aramaic incantation bowls from Sasanian Mesopotamia is perhaps the most important source we have for studying the everyday beliefs and practices of the Jewish, Christian, Mandaean, Manichaean, Zoroastrian and Pagan communities on the eve of the Islamic conquests. The bowls are from the Schøyen Collection, which has some 650 texts in different varieties of Aramaic: Jewish Aramaic, Mandaic and Syriac, and forms the largest collection of its kind anywhere in the world. This volume presents editions of sixty-four Jewish Aramaic incantation bowls, with accompanying introductions, translations, philological notes, photographs and indices. The themes covered include the magical divorce and the accounts of the wonder-working sages Ḥanina ben Dosa and Joshua bar Peraḥia. It is the first of a multi-volume project that aims to publish the entire Schøyen Collection"--

"Letters and accounts connected with the court of the satrap of Bactria, Akhvamazda, and with his governor, Bagavant, ... the first time that parts of the internal correspondence of the administration of Bactria and Sogdiana have come to light. ... This is the fourth century BCE, close to the end of the Achaemenid rule in Iran, ... in the north-eastern tip of the empire. ... Some of the items in this collection are written on wooden sticks, the first time that this system of bookkeeping is being discovered anywhere, and they are remarkably well preserved. ... The present book, with the original documents that it contains, gives a picture of everyday life in an important Achaemenian province. It affords a glimpse into ... how a large empire of antiquity was run and how the Persian rule was ultimately replaced by a Greek administration. The notes in this book show the continuity in usage from Achaemenian to Sasanian, and sometimes up to modern times."--From introductory notes, page x, xiv, xx.