Amulet Atlas

peopleShaul Shakedשאול שקד

peopleThe LevantMesopotamiaIranIsraelIraqIranconfidence mediumneeds checking

Israeli Iranist and philologist, 1933–2021, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He read the Aramaic incantation bowls and metal amulets of late antique Babylonia alongside Zoroastrian and Middle Persian material, which is why his editions catch what the Jewish, Christian, Mandaean and Iranian texts borrowed from one another.

cited

When

5 March 1933 – 27 October 2021 cited

PeriodTwentieth to twenty-first century
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it
NoteDates read from the Hebrew Wikipedia entry; the English Wikipedia has no article on him.

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

Shaked was born in Debrecen, Hungary, on 5 March 1933. He took his doctorate in Iranian languages at SOAS in 1964 and taught at the Hebrew University in Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies and in Comparative Religion, holding the Schwarzman chair. He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1985 and chaired its humanities division from 1995 to 2001. He won the Israel Prize for Linguistics in 2000 and the Sándor Scheiber Prize in 2012.

His listed research interests are Zoroastrianism, Middle Persian lexicography, early Judaeo-Persian, Aramaic magical texts, and Aramaic and Arabic loan words in Iranian. The bowls sit at the join of all of those. A Babylonian bowl written in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and buried under a floor names demons with Iranian names and formulas with Jewish ones; a reader who knows only one side of that misses half the text.

With Joseph Naveh he published "Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity" and "Magic Spells and Formulae" in 1993. He continued the corpus with others — "Aramaic Bowl Spells: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls", with James N. Ford and Siam Bhayro, volume one from Brill in 2013 and volume two in 2022. He died on 27 October 2021.

cited

Now

The bowl corpus is still being edited volume by volume, and the later volumes are appearing after his death. Inference — an amulet class whose standard edition is unfinished is a class whose dating and readings will move, so this atlas's Aramaic bowl records are marked as provisional wherever they lean on a text rather than on an object.

inference

What this is near

kinIncantation bowlthe object his editions made readable, spiral line by spiral linepersonJoseph Navehhis co-author: Naveh brought the letter-forms, Shaked the Iranian side of the vocabularytraditionPractical Kabbalahthe tradition whose late antique ancestor these bowls and strips areparallelIslamic talismanic craftthe neighbouring tradition in the same region, which inherited some of the same formulasmotifThe namethe sign the bowls turn on — whose names get written, and in which languagedescendantTa'wizthe later pouched written charm of the same region, in Arabic rather than Aramaic

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

personIncantation bowlthe other half of that edition, and the reason a bowl text can be quoted at all herepersonPractical Kabbalahthe other, and the scholar who traced how the same formulas cross between this tradition and its neighbourspersonJoseph Navehhis co-author on the Aramaic amulet and bowl editions, over roughly three decades

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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