A discovery at Nippur
Austen Henry Layard uncovers an inscribed bowl at Nippur. Ancient spells return to view.
Small vessels.
Human hopes.
Enduring questions.
Ancient spells. Everyday fears. Discover the lives hidden in incantation bowls.
Clay / Language / MemorySpells that outlived their makers
Protection,
close to home.
A spell against illness. A shield for a family. Written on ordinary clay, these words reveal what people feared—and what they hoped to keep safe.
Originating in Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq and neighboring Iran, most bowls were made in the sixth and seventh centuries CE, in late antiquity—a world that changed with the rise of Islam.
A thousand years later,
the bowls resurface.
The first texts in print
Thomas Ellis publishes bowl texts in Layard’s book. The work of reading their spells begins.
Sources for the story
Brodie and Kersel, “WikiLeaks, Text, and Archaeology,” in Archaeologies of Text (2014), p. 200 dates Layard’s finds at Babylon and Nippur to 1850. Earlier bowls reached the British Museum in 1841.
British Museum: Ellis’s 1853 publication, in Layard, pp. 521–522.
More pages.
More questions.
Each generation finds more to uncover.
Scholarly publications indexed, by decadePublications / decade
Scroll across the chart, or open the table below for every decade.
Read the chart as a table
| Decade | Publications |
|---|---|
| 1850s | 3 |
| 1860s | 1 |
| 1870s | 1 |
| 1880s | 4 |
| 1890s | 7 |
| 1900s | 1 |
| 1910s | 4 |
| 1920s | 1 |
| 1930s | 7 |
| 1940s | 2 |
| 1950s | 1 |
| 1960s | 5 |
| 1970s | 10 |
| 1980s | 6 |
| 1990s | 14 |
| 2000s | 32 |
| 2010s | 61 |
| 2020s (incomplete) | 51 |
A world of bowls.
One place to explore.
Bowlam brings together the bowls, their words, and their journeys. Our aim: the most complete index possible.
1,652bowls in the index
1,652 bowls in the index.
Recorded Not recorded in this index
Meet the collection.
The index brings together 1,652 bowls from 1,969 source records — each one an appearance of a bowl in a publication, a catalogue or a collection, linked to the object it appears to describe.
The collection grows as research continues.
Read their words.
718 / 1,65243.5% of bowls
Scholarly editions that read and translate these bowls are recorded against the objects they describe.
Follow their journeys.
362 / 1,65221.9% of bowls
Published accounts of where bowls were found, and the collections they have passed through, are recorded as claims attributed to their sources.
Look closer.
326 / 1,65219.7% of bowls
Photographs and drawings in publications and collection catalogues are indexed as references, not reproduced here.
Each circle stands for one bowl in the index. Highlighting shows how many bowls carry each kind of reference — some carry all three. Which circles light up is illustrative: this page publishes totals, not records for individual bowls.
What we index,
and what we hold back.
An index of who said what about which bowl is useful only if it is honest about its own limits.
A bowl is not a catalogue entry.
The same bowl can appear in several publications under several numbers. The index keeps those appearances separate and records how confident it is that they describe one object, rather than silently merging them.
Every statement has a source.
Dates, findspots, measurements and readings are recorded as claims attributed to a publication, with a page or catalogue locator. Where sources disagree, both readings are kept.
We do not republish other people’s work.
Modern transcriptions, translations, commentary and photographs belong to the scholars, publishers and collections that made them. The index records that they exist and where to find them. It does not reproduce them.
Provenance is reported, not settled.
Many bowls left Iraq and Iran in circumstances that are contested or undocumented. Recording what a source reports about an object’s history is not a statement that its ownership, export or authenticity is established.
The index is still being built.
Leave an address and we will write when there is something worth reading — new coverage, a public release, or access for researchers.
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