The Virtual Magic Bowl Archive is a collaborative environment for the publication of magic bowls in the Moussaieff, Dehays, and Barakat collections. It is housed at the University of Southampton, under the direction of Dr. Dan Levene, with a number of other prominent collaborators in Europe, Israel, and North America. While the archive, which includes photographs and transcriptions, currently has restricted access, The VMBA site contains several useful resources and descriptions of ongoing projects. These include the Aramaic Magical Texts from Late Antiquity (AMTLA), a BIRAX project conducted by Dr. Dan Levene and Prof. Gideon Bohak, part of which is the valuable prosopography of the Babylonian Magic Bowls, compiled by Dr. Ortal-Paz Saar of Tel Aviv University, which covers the major corpora of bowls in the various dialects of Aramaic found in Sasanian and early Islamic Mesopotamia, i.e., Jewish Aramaic, Syriac, and Mandaic. Additionally, the site describes Dan Levene’s Aggressive Jewish Aramaic Incantation Project, which resulted in a textual corpus, published as a print book; as well as his online introduction to the subject.
