Amulet Atlas

peopleCampbell Bonner

peopleAncient EgyptGreece and the AegeanThe LevantNorth AmericaUnited States of AmericaEgyptGreececonfidence mediumneeds checking

American classicist, 1876–1954, of the University of Michigan, who wrote the book that made carved magical gems a subject with a method. "Studies in Magical Amulets, Chiefly Graeco-Egyptian", Ann Arbor, 1950, described and classified the engraved stones of the late Roman eastern Mediterranean — the ones cut with Abraxas, the reaper, the womb-symbol, strings of vowels — and set out how to read the images and the inscriptions together.

cited

When

30 January 1876 – 11 July 1954 cited

PeriodTwentieth century
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

Bonner was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on 30 January 1876 and died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 11 July 1954. His published work runs from 1921 and covers magical papyri as well as gems; the amulets sat inside a wider study of popular religion in the late pagan and early Christian world.

The gems are small, hard and portable, cut in haematite, jasper, carnelian and chalcedony, and they carry a mixture nobody else had sorted: Egyptian gods, Greek vowels, Hebrew divine names, Roman medical language. Bonner's 1950 volume is where that mixture stopped being a curiosity list and became a corpus with types.

Inference — the tell of a corpus that worked is that it grew after its author died. The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest runs the Campbell Bonner Magical Gems Database, named for him, launched in 2010, and it estimates the entire corpus at around 5,600 pieces. That is a number nobody could have counted before the material had a shared vocabulary.

cited

Now

The database at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest carries his name and, in its own words, has "the primary aim ... to bring the entire corpus of magical gems online". This project has not read a published academic criticism of Bonner's framing and does not assert that none exists.

cited

What this is near

kinMagical gemthe object class his 1950 book defined, named and made countablemotifThe namethe sign his gems carry most consistently — names and vowel-strings cut beside the figuretraditionGreek and Roman protective magicthe tradition his corpus belongs to, at its late and most mixed endmaterialCarnelianone of the stones the gems are cut from, alongside haematite and jasperparallelChristopher A. Faraonethe classicist working the same Greek material two generations on, and asking how the amulets changed under RomepracticeInscribingthe practice his method reads — image and cut text taken together, never separatelystoryDating a charmthe long read on dating; an uninscribed gem with no find-spot is the hard case his typology exists for

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

personMagical gemthe scholar the standing database of these stones is named forparallelChristopher A. Faraonethe scholar who first made the late Greek amulets a corpus he is now reading for change over time

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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