A New Mandaic Incantation Bowl from Babil (IM 91-100147)

The Iraqi Museum now houses hundreds of incantation bowls in terracotta, the writing generally being in a formal standardized literary Eastern Aramaic. My paper presents a new incantation bowl written in Mandaic script. The text runs in lines like sunbeams spreading outwards from the center, and is composed of 27 lines. It is part of a collection housed in the Iraq Museum (IM 91-100147), reserved in my name. Its provenance is from Tell al-Ḏuwayḥī. The inscription was written on the inner surface of the cover of a vessel and was intended to protect what is inside the vessel against various types of malevolent forces. This paper is divided into the following sections: descriptions of physical characteristics, transliteration of the text and linguistic commentary