ABSTRACT
The Hebrews who lived in the various quarters of the eastern half of Babylon, and in the western suburbs of the city where the town of Ḥillah now stands, buried under the four corners of the foundations of their houses and other buildings inverted terra-cotta bowls inscribed with magical texts. The Hebrews who lived at Cuthah and Niffar and other places did the same thing, and they all did so with the idea of shielding their houses and homes and themselves from the attacks of all kinds of evil spirits, and from the baleful influences of earth-inhabiting demons. These bowls were to the Hebrews what the prophylactic clay figures which have been described above were to the Sumerians and Babylonians (see page 97 f). The British Museum possesses a very large collection of such bowls, which have been obtained from excavations made in Babylonia and Assyria by Layard and several officers of the British Museum between 1850 and 1906, and from native dealers. Some of these are inscribed in the Hebrew language with the “square ” Hebrew characters, and others in the dialect of the Targûms in a species of cursive Syriac characters, and others in Mandaïtic (i.e. a Semitic dialect similar to that found in the Talmûdh Babhlî) in its own special character. The oldest of these bowls, those with Hebrew inscriptions inside them, date from the 1st or Ilnd century B.C., and the most modern are not older than the Vlth century a.d. The reproductions of four of the bowls in the British Museum Collection which are given in this Chapter illustrate the palaeography, and the following paragraphs will give an idea of the contents of the inscriptions.
