Dating to the second or third century C.E., this papyrus was key to the decipherment of the Demotic Ancient Egyptian dialect. It is also of great importance for the study of magic in antiquity. Included are spells to cure diseases, obtain visions, raise the dead, etc., as well as a number of spells for erotic purposes. The text contains invocations to a wide range of deities and other entities, with names drawn from the Ancient Egyptian pantheon and the Gnostic Aeons.
Production notes: For technical and time reasons, I had to leave out the transliterated Demotic text and the footnotes. This text includes all of the preface, introduction and translation, however. Support for the Coptic alphabet is implemented in the most recent version of Unicode but it is not supported by all Unicode fonts at this time. For this reason, I have used images to embed Coptic text in the etext. This book is better known under the title The Leyden Papyrus, by which it was reprinted by Dover in 1974 (see box to right).
Correspondence of Columns