Manfred Kropp

The ʿAyn ʿAbada Inscription Thirty Years Later: A Reassessment

I will not insist on details of the magic rite probably to be performed while reciting this formula—touching a sorewoundwith a hoof of an animal.Wewill come back to worms during this lecture and thus elucidate the connection— at least created by association—to the subject to be treated here, but for the moment some general remarks will suffice. The first written documents of many languages are either poetry or magical formulas of the kind we heard some moments before. This is true for German. Besides the famous oaths of Straßburg2—an oath is a kind of magical formula,