Sacred Texts  Egyptian 

The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden

(The Leyden Papyrus)

by F. Ll. Griffith and Herbert Thompson

[1904]


Dating to the second or third century C.E., this papyrus was key to the decipherment of the Demotic Ancient Egyptian dialect. It is also of great importance for the study of magic in antiquity. Included are spells to cure diseases, obtain visions, raise the dead, etc., as well as a number of spells for erotic purposes. The text contains invocations to a wide range of deities and other entities, with names drawn from the Ancient Egyptian pantheon and the Gnostic Aeons.

Production notes: For technical and time reasons, I had to leave out the transliterated Demotic text and the footnotes. This text includes all of the preface, introduction and translation, however. Support for the Coptic alphabet is implemented in the most recent version of Unicode but it is not supported by all Unicode fonts at this time. For this reason, I have used images to embed Coptic text in the etext. This book is better known under the title The Leyden Papyrus, by which it was reprinted by Dover in 1974 (see box to right).


Title Page
Preface
Contents
Introduction

Translation

Col. I
Col II.
Col. III
Col. IV.
Col V.
Col VI.
Col. VII
Col. VII
Col. IX
Col. X
Col. XI
Col. XII
Col. XIII
Col. XIV
Col. XV
Col. XVI
Col. XVII
Col. XVIII
Col. XIX
Col. XX
Col. XXI
Col. XXII
Col. XXIII
Col. XXIV
Col. XXV
Col. XXVI
Col. XXVII
Col. XXVIII
Col. XXIX

Verso

Verso Col. I
Verso Col. II
Verso Col. III
Verso Col. IV.
Verso Col. V
Verso Col. VI.
Verso Col. VII
Verso Col. VIII
Verso Col. IX
Verso Col. X
Verso Col. XI
Verso Col. XII
Verso Col. XIII
Verso Col. XIV
Verso Col. XV
Verso Col. XVI
Verso Col. XVII
Verso Col. XVIII
Verso Col. XIX
Verso Col. XX
Verso Col. XXI
Verso Col. XXII
Verso Col. XXIII
Verso Col. XXIV
Verso Col. XXV
Verso Col. XXVI
Verso Col. XXVII
Verso Col. XXVIII
Verso Col. XXIX
Verso Col. XXX
Verso Col. XXXI
Verso Col. XXXII
Verso Col. XXXIII

 

Correspondence of Columns