Discussant: Ilona Regulski (Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Berlin)

This introduction—to a larger work in progress—is structured around a long biography of the Enchanted Basin (al-Ḥawḍ al-Marṣūd), a Late Period (ca. 600 BCE) sarcophagus that became a medieval healing basin, a colonial artifact, and ultimately the namesake of a modern hospital. The basin is not only an object of material endurance but also of shifting epistemologies: a site where medicine and magic, text and talisman, ancient and modern continually intersect. In tracing its transformations, the introduction raises two central issues. First, it examines the porous boundaries between “sciences” and “occult sciences” in Egyptian history. Healing attributed to stones, inscriptions, or jinn was not marginal to medicine, rather it was part of an overlapping landscape of practice in which materials, words, and spirits operated together. Second, the basin illuminates how Egyptians themselves engaged with the deep past. Hapmen’s imitation of Thutmose III’s sarcophagus, medieval reuses of pharaonic stone, and enduring vernacular traditions, reveal active processes of remembering, appropriating, and reinterpreting ancient Egypt. The introduction establishes the Enchanted Basin as a lens for the book’s broader themes: object afterlives, the entanglement of material culture and healing, and how knowledge of Egypt’s ancient past was continuously remade across time.