『古代ギリシア語魔術パピルス』の生産者と消費者

The Ancient Greek Magical Papyri is a generic name of magical manuals mainly written in Greek found in Egypt dated from the late Ptolemaic to the Roman times. Since 1980’s, there have been three main trends: the bilingual aspect (esp., Greek + Demotic) of the document, the etic and emic perspectives, and the redefinition of the document as Greco-Egyptian private ritual. And according to the priest to magician model, the producers were the high-ranking priests, the Egyptian temples began to decay from the third century by the Roman Emperors’ policy, and the priests left the temples, turning itinerant magicians for people’s daily life. However, the magical documents had already existed long before the temples were supposed to be decayed.
First this paper examines the merits and demerits of these three trends respectively. Second it deals with the dispute over the nature of the Egyptian priests of the Greco-Roman period. And third it underlines of the maldistribution of the documents, mainly in Thebes, to which the bilingual magical documents belonged. This paper focuses on the low-ranking priests as the main producer of the documents, haunting Alexandria, the cultural crossing point, though the humidity did not allow papyri to survive, and on the Greek speaking people such as Greeks and Jews living in cities in the East as the consumers.