Who Wrote Ritual Formularies from Egypt? A Study of <i>P.Lond.</i> I 121 (= <i>PGM</i> VII) and Its Possible Relationship with Scholarly Patronage in Late Antiquity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The “Greek” and “Egyptian” “magical papyri” are a group of late Hellenistic to late antique ritual formularies, amulets, and other activated texts, most of which were written in Greek and found in Egypt. They have been traditionally interpreted as the grimoires of magicians until recently. Following the work of David Frankfurter, it is now often assumed that most recipes were created by priests in Roman Egypt in a bid to attract the patronage of Greek-educated patrons after Egyptian temple cults collapsed in the third century CE. However, recent studies on temples in Roman Egypt demonstrate that there is no compelling evidence attesting to an early decline of Egyptian temples. Empire-wide increase and decline in economic and literary activities provide a more accurate context for the appearance and disappearance of Greek ritual recipe books in late antique Egypt. The ritual formulary known as P.Lond. I 121 (= PGM 7) is a good candidate for this approach as it suggests the aptitudes and interests manifested by Greek-educated client scholars.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".