Mandaic Bowl

Southern Mesopotamia, 5th—6th century CE
Clay
Cincinnati Skirball Museum, museum purchase with funds provided by Dr. Helen
Iglauer Glueck, A/1331

This bowl carries script used by the Mandaeans, a strongly anti-Jewish gnostic, or mystical, sect
of southern Mesopotamia. Along with Diaspora Jews, the pagan Mandaeans were inhabitants of
Persian Babylonia.

Similar bowls were found from the area of Nippur (an ancient Sumerian city located today in the
Middle Euphrates region of Iraq) to Baghdad. The writing on this bowl is an incantation, a
formula or magic words intended to produce supernatural effects. The words are in an Aramaic
dialect, an early Semitic language, and they start at the center of the bowl and circle upward to
the rim. It was believed that these incantation bowls would ward off demons who might affect
the birth of a child, causing madness and disease. It was the way to cope with things that were
beyond rational understanding. Even rabbis wrote incantations.

The translation of the Aramaic incantation gives clues to its use, as it mentions the four corners
of the house. Large numbers of similar bowls have been found at archeological sites, placed
upside-down in the corners of houses. Some bowls have drawings on them. In the case of this
bowl, there is a drawing of a demon on the outside. The translation of the incantation is as
follows:

Overturned, wrapped up, and repulsed are all the curses and incantations of women and men
and boys and girls, of my evil enemies and all my adversaries, which are cursed and chanted
night and day. They are bound and overturned in the four corners of my house—Mihdanahik
daughter of Liula.

You will go away and not become enraged. You will be smashed and not drawn out. And you will
dry up like an embryo in an egg. In the name of Tabaq, the angel (!), who seizes and grabs all

the curses that they cursed me—Mshirtsai son of Mhudanduk. And it is removed from her by the
strength of Adununai Yorba, head of all the temple-spirits and the shepherd of all the great
chariots of darkness.

You, be distant, that none of the curses and incantations of the day and the night might reach
her. Bound…are the curses, incantations, and words…