From Incantation to Ingestion? Polemics and Politics of Islamic Bowl Magic

One of the shibboleths of modern scholarship is that the origins of engraved medieval metal vessels known as Islamic magic-medicinal bowls lie in a series of inked ceramic incantation bowls from late-antique Iraq. Since the Islamic bowls differ in their materiality, iconographic context, and function, the assumption is problematic. Moreover, despite the insistence on continuity in the face of a significant chronological disjunction between both kinds of bowls, the existence of a class of late antique incantation bowls inked in Arabic (rather than in Aramaic, Mandaic, or Syriac) has been almost entirely overlooked. This neglect reveals significant biases in modern scholarship underwritten by collecting practices and the antiquities market. It has also obscured the existence of widespread and long-standing traditions of inking unglazed ceramic vessels with Arabic texts for “magical” purposes, paralleling the traditions represented by the better-known (and more traditionally collectible) metal Islamic bowls. Such unostentatious ceramics fall foul of a high-low division that has been pervasive in structuring the canon of Islamic art history. Rather than demonstrating continuities with a single localized tradition, their existence across a broad geographic and temporal span points to a more general relationship between rituals of domesticity and the materials of magic meriting closer examination than it has received to date.