Text taken from La Lettre du Collège de France n° 34, Paris, Collège de France, p. 24, ISSN 1628-2329
The last lecture ("Text, image and medium: the evolution of Greco-Roman magic stones") dealt with the apparent explosion - to modern eyes - of magic gems under the Roman Empire. Prof. Faraone suggested that these gems had not been a pure invention of the period, but had become visible to us in archaeological sources due to the increase in epigraphic practices during the Imperial period. Prof. Faraone, limiting his analyses to five stones - hematite, lapis lazuli, and jaspers of three different colors - argued in each case that simpler, uninscribed versions of these stones were probably used as amulets prior to the Roman period. More precisely, he suggested that we can always trace an evolution back to a stone initially assumed to possess innate power, without the addition of image or text. Later, however, people began to add something to the stone - images at first, according to Prof. Faraone, who dates this innovation to the late Classical or early Hellenistic period. In turn, Roman sorcerers and lapidaries innovated, first by adding text to these combinations of media and images. In other words, the elaborately inscribed stones of the Roman period provide excellent evidence of the "scribalization" of amulets, but not of their invention.
