Magical Treasure-Hunting in Islamic Egypt

“The Arabic treasure books, in contrast, emerged in an Egyptian context…no corresponding texts exist in the European magical tradition…”

-Dr Christopher Braun

Recently, officials reported the discovery of an Egyptian archpriest’s four millennia-old tomb. Remarkably, the cleric’s final resting place in Saqqara, Egypt, was unusually well-preserved, with the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities calling it “one of a kind in the last decades”.

The finding—no doubt made with high-tech geological scans and painstakingly slow excavation methods—is a world away from the expedited, winner-takes-all activities of certain Egyptian magicians and writers who lived during the days of the Mamluk and Ottoman sultanates. For the most part, these adventurers had minimal interest in sacerdotal sarcophagi and mummified remains. Instead, each hoped to become a kind of Croesus by discovering a jackpot of buried riches in ruins, mosques, churches, monasteries, caves and other remote or antiquated crypts and monuments.

Somewhat like the Christian scholastici vagantes of early modern Europe, Muslim fortune-hunters relied on what they believed were secret texts, Arabic treasure-hunting manuals containing rudimentary maps, lists of treasures, and spells for how to “lift” said treasures from hard-to-reach sanctums.

According to Dr Christopher Braun, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich’s Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, these treatises were a “local phenomenon, forming part of a unique Islamic Egyptian tradition. “The Arabic treasure books,” he told The Thinker’s Garden, “never left the land of the river Nile.”

Although the manuscripts themselves were produced in the Middle Ages, Dr Braun believes “similar books must have circulated as early as the beginning of the fourth century, perhaps even earlier.” We spoke to him to find out more behind the as-yet-unheralded Egyptian kutub al-mutālibīn (manuals for treasure-hunters) genre.

The Custodian: What initially attracted you to the subject of treasure-hunting in the Islamic world?

Dr Christopher Braun: My preoccupation with Arabic treasure books began, quite fittingly, with a discovery. After my graduation, I spent several months at the University and Research Library Erfurt-Gotha as a Herzog Ernst Fellow. While perusing the catalogue of the library’s oriental manuscript collection, I stumbled upon an intriguing subcategory within the catalogue’s section on occult sciences. It was entitled “Schätze und deren Hebung” (“Treasures and How to Raise Them”). The cataloguer, Wilhelm Pertsch (1832–1899), subsumed under this subcategory manuscripts that transmitted anonymous lists of geographic locations in Egypt where treasure was said to be hidden.

These lists consist of hundreds of single entries, each of them introduced by the phrase “description of” (ṣifa bi-) followed by the name of the respective geographic location. In Arabic, these treasure indications are called dalāʾil (“signs” or “indications”). They usually consist of a description of the way to the hidden treasure, a description of the treasure itself, and information on the necessary magical rituals to appease the treasure-guarding spirits or deactivate lethal mechanical contraptions.

The existence of such enigmatic and unknown texts among Gotha’s oriental collection was quite a surprise to me. Since they promised to be an interesting source to investigate the perception of the Pharaonic civilisation in Islamic Egypt, an aspect I was very interested in at the time, I decided to conduct a more detailed investigation of these texts. In consultation with Professor Charles Burnett, I eventually decided to explore the origins and the social context of these manuscripts and to write a Ph.D. thesis on Arabic treasure books.

C: What did most people in medieval and early modern Islamicate societies think was the original function of the pyramids?

CB:  Many rumours existed on the pyramids, their builders, and their functions in medieval and early modern times. They were identified as treasure houses and/or tombs of ancient kings. Some believed Hermes Trismegistus was buried in one of them, others identified them as the granaries, Joseph [the Biblical vizier of Egypt and interpreter of dreams] had erected, for the predicted seven years of famine. Thus, the original purpose of these monuments was no longer known in Islamic times.

In Arabic treasure books, they were called al-ahrām al-shaddādiyya, “the Pyramids of Shaddād.” According to legend, Shaddād b.ʿĀd was a king who built Iram of of the Pillars, a city mentioned in the Qurʾān whose opulence shall have rivalled paradise. Imposing pre-Islamic monuments were sometimes attributed to Shaddād and his tribe and so were the pyramids. Surprisingly, Arabic treasure books do not present the pyramids as treasure houses of Shaddād or former rulers of Egypt. They rather refer to them as a starting point from which the treasure hunter is then guided to treasure buried in the pyramids’ vicinity.

C: What kinds of magic and strategies did Muslim fortune-hunters use to pinpoint excavation sites and keep spirits at bay? Did they occasionally work alongside Jewish and Christian occultists? Did they make any efforts to recruit, collaborate with, or appease jinn?

CB: The Arabic sources present different magical techniques and strategies to find hidden treasure. It seems that the search for undiscovered riches was a pressing concern throughout the centuries, since many Arabic treatises on astrology, geomancy, and magic deal with finding and raising hidden hoards.

While some of these techniques require complex calculations (that is, a thorough understanding of prognostication or expertise in the recitation of intricate magical formulae), the Arabic treasure books, most often, offer a more straightforward method. Luckily, the fortunate owner of such a book simply needed to follow the instructions. The individual treasure indications provide more or less detailed descriptions of the way to the exact spot and the respective rituals to keep the treasure-guarding demons and jinn at bay or to render the deadly mechanical contraptions innocuous.

These consist most of the time of the fumigation of a variety of incenses and the recitation of magical formulae. Rarely, the treasure hunter shall slaughter fowl or other small animals as sacrificial offerings. Some apotropaic means are rather curious. Several treasure indications advise the treasure hunter to make wax imprints of temple wall reliefs and to carry these wax imprints on his head.

Whereas the authors of the Arabic treasure books mainly conceived the supernatural guardians as one of the many obstacles (mawāniʿ) barring the way to the treasures, the authors of Arabic magical texts provided some spells that allowed the magician to summon jinn and other spirits and to coerce them to bring treasures along or to reveal the presence of treasures at particular sites. Whether this might hint at a conceptional division between these two genres is hard to tell. I assume that those desirous of unearthing hidden riches might have applied different techniques.

C: Is there anything in their rituals that might derive from practices originating in Pharaonic Egypt?

CB: The theory on “survivals” from Pharaonic times has been controversially debated. I am not an Egyptologist by training and I would be wary of claiming such a long continuity. There are numerous similarities and analogies between the spells and rituals in the Greek magical papyri, the Coptic magical texts and the Arabic treasure books. The latter therefore clearly represent a strand of “Egyptian magic”, although the rituals might not date back to Pharaonic times.

The genre of Arabic treasure books was an Arab invention. I have not come across any similar text among the preserved Greek and Coptic texts that provides a description of the way to the treasure and instructions on the necessary magical rituals. The Jews in Egypt, as Gideon Bohak has already pointed out, received the treasure books from their Arab contemporaries. Available sources suggest that these texts emerged among Arab and Arabic-writing magicians and those dabbling in this occult art. As a matter of course, the magical rituals are at times highly syncretistic and can consist of a mixture of Islamic, Christian and Jewish forms of piety and religious devotion.

C: Can you tell us about your current and upcoming projects and lectures?

CB: At the moment, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich and part of a research team that prepares an edition and German translation of Ibn ArfaʿRaʾs’ The Gold Splinters (Shudhūr al-dhahab), an Arabic alchemical collection of poems. In addition, I’m currently working on two articles, one on a particular healing ritual in a treatise on spiritual medicine and another one on the notion of magic in alchemical literature. Finally, I intend to revise my Ph.D thesis on Arabic treasure books and to submit my manuscript to the publisher soon. “And that is all there is to it wa-l-salām (Peace be upon you)!”

Want more stories? Check out our spin-off project, Godfrey’s Almanack.