Amulet Atlas

peopleJoseph Naveh

peopleThe LevantMesopotamiaIsraelIraqIranconfidence mediumneeds checking

Israeli epigrapher and palaeographer, 1928–2011, who read the writing on the amulets. With Shaul Shaked he published the Aramaic texts of late antique metal amulet strips and of the clay incantation bowls — the objects buried upside down under house floors in Babylonia — in editions that print the text, the translation and the object together.

cited

When

21 January 1928 – 21 November 2011 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

Naveh was born in Mukachevo, then Czechoslovakia, on 21 January 1928. He worked for the Israel Department of Antiquities from 1955 to 1971 and was a district archaeologist from 1958, then taught in the Department of Ancient Semitic Languages at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1971 to 1991. His field was West Semitic epigraphy: the shapes of letters, and what the shapes date.

That is the skill the amulet material needs. A rolled silver or bronze lamella and a bowl written in a spiral both carry script and nothing else datable — no stratigraphy in a bowl bought on a market, no style in a thin strip of metal. "The Development of the Aramaic Script", his 1970 dissertation, and "Early History of the Alphabet", 1997, are the tools; the amulet volumes are what he used them on.

With Shaked he produced "Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity" and then "Magic Spells and Formulae" in 1993. Inference — the dating in this atlas for any Aramaic amulet or bowl rests on that letter-by-letter work, whether or not the record says so.

He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1994. He died on 21 November 2011.

cited

Now

The bowls keep arriving on the antiquities market without find-spots, which is the reason his palaeography stays load-bearing and also the reason the objects are contested. This project has not read a published provenance study of the bowl corpus and does not assert what share of it was excavated.

inference

What this is near

kinIncantation bowlthe object he and Shaked edited — text, translation and bowl printed togetherpersonShaul Shakedhis co-author on the Aramaic amulet and bowl editions, over roughly three decadeskinKetef Hinnom silver scrollsthe rolled silver amulet strip from Jerusalem — the object class his palaeography datestraditionPractical Kabbalahthe later tradition these late antique Aramaic texts sit behindmotifThe namethe sign his editions are mostly reading: the names written into the bowls and stripsmaterialSilverthe metal the rolled amulet strips are beaten from, and the reason their text survives at allpracticeInscribingthe practice his whole method addresses — what was written, in which hand, and when

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

personIncantation bowlwith Shaul Shaked, the editor whose 1985 Amulets and Magic Bowls put these texts in front of readers who are not AramaistspersonPractical Kabbalahone of the two editors who made the Aramaic evidence for the ancestor practice readablepersonShaul Shakedhis co-author: Naveh brought the letter-forms, Shaked the Iranian side of the vocabulary

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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