A team of German university professors has set up a specialized center dedicated to researching and understanding ancient magic and magical texts, with a focus on the spread of that knowledge across ancient Egypt, the ancient Near East, and surrounding regions.
Dubbed “Magic between Entanglement, Interaction, and Analogy,” or MagEIA, the new center will spend at least four years and 3.5 million euros analyzing ancient magic and magical tests to determine how the texts and the ancient knowledge they contain originated and how they could spread from the Eastern Mediterranean to Egypt and Central Asia several thousand years ago.