On 9 October 1851 the British Museum purchased eight incantation bowls from Col. Henry Rawlinson. Of these, seven were written in Aramaic. They were recorded by the Minutes of the Trustees of the British Museum as coming from “a tomb at Babylon”, per se a most unusual provenance since incantation bowls are usually associated with domestic loci. The seven incantation bowls all name the same male client, one Mahperoz son of Hindo. Palaeographic studies on the typical Babylonian Aramaic script in which they were written reveal that they were the product of the same hand. The physical typology of the incantation bowls (hemispherical in form with simple rims measuring 0.6 cm thick and shaved bases) suggests that all seven were selected from the same workshop, and possibly even from the same batch of pottery. In such a situation, where the incantation bowls clearly form a group and were written for a single client, one might expect the texts to be duplicates.Four of the seven bowls purchased from Rawlinson were inscribed with a common incantation text that Ben Segal has designated as Refrain A. This commences with a distinctive call for the overthrow of the world and heavenly order as well as the reversal of female cursers. Over the past one hundred and fifty years a dozen examples of this text have have come to light in a variety of international museums and private collections. The largest group is that of the British Museum which has no less than eight examples, including the four Rawlinson bowls as well as a small flat-bottomed stopper that Hormuzd Rassam obtained from Sippar during the excavations which the British Museum conducted at that site between 1881 and 1882. The remaining four examples of Refrain A are in the Iraq Museum, Baghdad, the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in collections of antiquities that are owned by the Churchs' Ministry amongst the Jewish People, St Albans, England, and Near Eastern Fine Arts, New York, U.S.A.
Manipulating incantation texts: Excursions in Refrain A