Sigla: 
Modern names for the manuscript, including inventory and publication numbers.
|
Bruce Codex |
| Category:
Classification of the contents, e.g. magical (formulary or applied), alchemical, liturgical, documentary or medical. |
Biblical (apocryphal) |
| Contents: | 1. p. 1: Frontispiece of cross |
| Form: | Codex |
| Material: | Papyrus |
| Dimensions (cm): | Height: 29.5 | Width: 17.5 | Depth: |
| Dimensions (notes): | Maximum dimensions (Crégheur 2013; p. 52). |
| Folding pattern: | Folded in the form of 4 sheets and bound (Baynes 1933: p. xvi). |
| State of preservation: | 71 of 78 original leaves survive, although some of these now lost leaves are preserved in older transcripts (Baynes 1933: p. xvi; Crégheur 2013: p. 51). |
| Pages/Columns:
Total surviving columns in the manuscript for rolls, sheets and rotuli; total number of pages for codices.
|
156 |
| Pages/Columns (notes): | Originally 78 folios = 156 pages, complete on purchase. Codex consisting of two quites. The first quire contains the First and Second Book of Jeu consisted of 47 folios = 94 pages), three leaves of which are now missing. The second quire contains the Untitled Text consisted of 31 leaves = 62 pages of which 4 leaves are now missing. 71 folios survive (= 142 pages). Between 27-34 lines per page. 1 column per page. (PAThs 1/11/2020). Pages 2 of first quire and 70 of second quire blank. |
| Hand: | 5 hands according to Crégheur 2013: p. 77-91; Baynes 1933 (p. xvi) describes hand(s) as uncial, upright, straight, characters are well formed, large and square. |
| Findspot: | Thebes, Egypt (TM places ID: 2235) |
| Place of purchase: | Thebes, Egypt (TM places ID: 2235) |
| Writingspot: | Thebes, Egypt (?) (TM places ID: 2235) |
| Present Location: | Oxford, Bodleian Library |
| Collection History: | Purchased in Upper Egypt, probably Thebes, by a Scottish traveller James Bruce in 1769, probably on 7-17 January (Crégheur 2014) . He sent it to London for examination by C- G. Woide. In 1848, it came into possession of the Bodelian Library (Bruce MS 96). M. G. Schwartze visited Oxford to study the text and made a copy of Woide’s transcript. Later, in 1882, Émile Amélineau visited Oxford to copy the text and in 1981 he published the text with a French translation, however, he did not take Woide-Schwartze remarks into consideration. In 1886, the Bodelian Library reduced the text in size, trimmed off the edges and discarded them. Also, the sequence of the leaves was lost. In 1890, Prof. Carl Schmidt visited Oxford and examined the text more thoroughly than Amélineau. He also compared the Woide-Schwartze copy with the original and he gave his own sequence of the texts. The text with a commentary was published in 1892. In 1928, Charlotte Baynes worked on the codex and reported that the codex had partially been restored and Schmidt’s page sequence applied (Bynes 1933: p. xiii-xv; Éric Crégheur 2013; PAThs 16/11/2020; O’Connell 2018: p. 86). |
| Trismegistos collection:
Page on the database Trismegistos collections for the institution which currently houses the manuscript. |
265 |
| Collection website: |
| Notes/Discussion: | Ordering of Schmidt followed here; cf. Crégheur 2013, 2017 for an alternative page order. TM entry for TM 108136 notes “bound with Arabic and Ethiopic texts”; this may be based on the statement in Schmidt and MacDermot 1978: p. 1978, that the codex “comprises Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic manuscripts”, but this seems to be a misstatement referring to the collection of James Bruce rather than the individual codex, since none of the descriptions of the codex describe texts in these languages (KD 16/11/2020). |
| Bibiliography |
| Editions: | Amélineau, Émile. Notice sur le papyrus gnostique Bruce. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1891, p. 65-305 [untitled text] |
| Translations: | Meyer, Marvin W., and Richard Smith. Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power. Princeton (New Jersey): Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 63-66, 66-68; nos. 38, 39. |
| General: | Crégheur, Éric. “Pour une nouvelle histoire de la découverte et de l’état primitif du codex Bruce (1769-1774)”, Journal of Coptic Studies 16 (2014): 47-68. |
| Trismegistos ID: | 108136 |
PAThs: | 18 |
| PGM:
Papyri Gracae Magicae
|
SM:
Supplementum Magicum
|
GEMF:
Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies (forthcoming)
|
ACM:
Ancient Christian Magic
|
38. 39 |
|||
| Bélanger Sarrazin:
Bélanger-Sarrazin. “Catalogue des textes magiques coptes” |
AKZ:
Ausgewählte koptische Zaubertexte |
CBd:
Campbell-Bonner Magical Gems Database |
Mert.-Pack:
Mertens-Pack online database |
||||
| Van H:
van Haelst, Catalogue des papyrus littéraires |
Bruyn-Dijkstra:
de Bruyn and Dijkstra, “Greek Amulets and Formularies (Checklist)" |
TheDefix:
Thesaurus Defixionum |
To Zodion: |
| Edit History: | MPS (24/4/2019); MPS (25/4/2019); EL (14/6/2019); KD (16/11/2020); KD (29/9/2021) |