Through a Glass Darkly: Magic, Dreams and Prophecy in Ancient Egypt, edited by Kasia Szpakowska
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For both the serious scholar and others interested in learning more of phenomena associated with ancient Egyptian life the essays in this volume provide careful exegesis of narrative literature covering a time span from the Old Kingdom (c.2250 BCE) through to the Ptolemaic period (c.330 BCE).John Baines (Oxford) notes that current scholarship proceeds with the recognition that by acknowledging magic (heka) as a basic cosmic force, rituals associated with the gods might be better understood.Magic, dreams, and prophecy form the basis of religious and sociopolitical relationships between people, deities, kings, the dead and the afterlife.He suggests that artifacts or tomb depictions such as amulets, beads and pouches might be considered as symbols of identity intended to effect transition to the afterworld.The influential role of heka in Egyptian society is reiterated by Alan B. Lloyd (Wales, Swansea) who notes that words and actions have the potential of altering normal experience.Certainly, understanding heka in this way encourages the reader to apprehend the diverse subjects covered in the essays as attempts to elucidate an ancient culture held together by this unifying force.Alan B. Lloyd (Wales, Swansea), discusses the evolution of the role of magic, dreams and prophecy in Egyptian narrative literature such as the Westcar Papyrus, Prophecy of Neferti, Amasis and the Skipper, Book of the Heavenly Cow, Eloquent Peasant, Shipwrecked Sailor, Doomed Prince, Two Brothers, the Setna tales, and the twentieth dynasty manuscript of the Conflict of Horu [s].He concludes that this literature reflects the religious, political, social and personal concerns of the people which produced it.Revealing the individual lives of ancient people is made easier when texts are discovered detailing the complexity of domestic and bureaucratic issues.John Ray (Cambridge) composes an historical picture of social, economic and familial tensions from the letters and dream episodes in c. 168-152 b c e of four individuals living in Greco-Egyptian Memphis.Joachim Friedrich Quack (Heidelberg) searches as yet unpublished papyri for references to the divination of life experiences.He discusses the use of omens to predict or influence the future and suspects that determination of the future might have included the use of die.Details of political campaigns inscribed on stelae suggest to Anthony Spalinger (Auckland) that the dreams of Amenhotep II (1428-1397 b c e ) and Merenptah (1213-1202 b c e ) might have been precipitated by fear of the unknown: the god's Amun and Ptah responding to their respective sons with divine assurance.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".