บุคคลแคมป์เบลล์ บอนเนอร์Campbell Bonner

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.

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.