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Magical gems

The designation 'magical gem' is a category of modern archaeology, which denotes the most sophisticated amulet type of the Roman Imperial Period. Magical gems were carved of precious stones sized 1 to 3 centimeters, chiefly between the 1st century BC to the 4th century AD, and were designed to bring their owners health, prosperity and love. Their typology follows the shapes of Graeco-Roman glyptics complemented with a few Mesopotamian and Egyptian variants. They are distinguished by their characteristic engravings of inscriptions, signs and images, which usually appear on both faces of the gems, and sometimes even on the edge. (For a more detailed definition of magical gems, see our Glossary.)

  

The Campbell Bonner Magical Gems Database

Today magical gems are preserved in different museums and private collections worldwide, often inaccessible to the public. The groundbreaking, and still fundamental, study on the genre was published in 1950 by American scholar Campbell Bonner, who then described a tenth of the corpus in his Studies on Magical Amulets. In 2004 Simone Michel listed over 2800 pieces in her monograph Die Magischen Gemmen
Named after Bonner, the primary aim of the Campbell Bonner Magical Gems Database (CBd) is to bring the entire corpus of magical gems online in order to make them better accessible for both scholars and the public, and to facilitate their study through the potentials of a digital platform. Since its launch in 2010 the database has grown into a popular research tool, and has aided in the recognition of the genre of magical gems as an important object group of the classical material tradition. Due largely to research conducted within the framework of the database, the entire corpus is now estimated at around 5600 pieces.
A further goal of CBd is to publish the second, online edition of Bonner’s Studies on Magical Amulets within the framework of the database, revised and enlarged by leading scholars of the field.