The Graeco-Aegyptiaca online seminar started in January 2022 with papers given monthly by established scholars in the field of Egyptian and Greek cultural relations. The fourth season's first event „The Transfer of Circular Designs and Egyptian Images from Magical Gems to Late-Antique Thunderstones” was held by Christopher A. Faraone (Chicago) on 22 October 2024.
Like many of their neighbors before and after, the Greeks in the Roman and Late-Antique Periods reused Stone-Age axe heads - also known as “celts” or “thunderstones” - as amulets, the larger ones to protect buildings and the smaller to protect individual human bodies, in some cases inscribing them with text and images to enhance their alleged power to ward off lightning strikes or the terrible fires that resulted from them. In the past, scholars, myself included, have focused primarily on the texts that were etched upon them, without paying enough attention to images and their overall designs and without asking where such images and designs may have come from. In what follows, expanding on previous work of mine regarding the transfer of gem designs of the Roman imperial period to Late-Antique amulets on papyri and metal foil, I look at a number of these thunderstones and argue that these elaborate designs were carved by artisans who copied Egyptian, Mithraic and other designs found in handbooks originally used for the production of magical gems or perhaps even from gems in their own possession. Crucial to my argument is how in some cases these artisans engraved the images in an oddly small scale, even though they had two or three times that space on the blade of the thunderstone, especially the over-sized ones used for protecting houses. Other cases include times when they illogically copied the square or circular boundary of the original gem onto an axe-head that was neither square nor circular in shape or when they carved two small images onto the same side of the thunderstone.
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Graeco-Aegyptiaca is a collaborative initiative by colleagues in the fields of Egyptology and Classics based in Hungary and the United Kingdom. The project aims to bring together researchers interested in the history of cultural interaction between Egyptians and Greeks from the very beginning to the Byzantine period.
Further information:
University College London - www.ucl.ac.uk/classics/graeco-aegyptiaca
The Palladion - www.palladion.hu/en/graeco-aegyptiaca-en/