The Sortes Astrampsychi: a book of oracles from Roman Egypt

Among the Greek papyri found in the rubbish mounds of ancient Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt, fragments have emerged of a remarkable work: a ready-to-use book of oracles, known as the Sortes Astrampsychi. It is neither a philosophical text nor a poem, but a handbook of questions and answers, designed for those who wished to learn the outcome of their everyday worries. Precisely for this reason it is a valuable source on the life, hopes and fears of the inhabitants of Egypt in the Roman period.

A legendary magus as author

The title derives from Astrampsychus, an Egyptian or Persian sage to whom Greek tradition attributed magical knowledge. The prologue of the work claims that the method was invented by Pythagoras and used by Alexander the Great to rule the world. These are fictitious attributions, common in texts of this kind, which served to lend prestige to a book that was in fact intended for a very wide public.

The papyrus fragments date mostly to the third and fourth centuries AD, but the work may be older. It is also preserved in medieval manuscripts, in a version reworked in a Christian sense, in which references to the pagan gods were removed or replaced. This adaptation shows how highly the book was valued even after the end of paganism.

A system of numbers and cross-references

The book opened with a list of ninety-two numbered questions. The enquirer chose their own and, through a number drawn by lot and a series of cross-reference tables, was directed to a group of answers and finally to a single sentence. The mechanism, ingenious and somewhat labyrinthine, gave the impression that the answer was chosen by chance or by a higher power, and not by whoever had written the book.

In reality each question had a small range of possible answers, some positive, others negative or delaying. The system thus ensured variety and plausibility. The modern scholars who reconstructed how it worked have compared it to a parlour game, but for its ancient users it was certainly something more serious.

The questions of a society

The fascination of the Sortes lies above all in the questions. People ask whether they will receive an inheritance, whether they will obtain a loan, whether they will find the runaway slave, whether they will become a member of the city council, whether the child about to be born will be a boy. Some questions reveal the harshest reality of the time, such as those of people who asked whether they would be sold or would gain their freedom.

Others concern journeys, illnesses, lawsuits and family relationships, including the possibility of being reconciled with one's spouse. A comparable Latin work, the Sortes Sangallenses, is preserved in a palimpsest in the library of Saint Gall and shows that similar oracle books also circulated in the Latin West of late antiquity.

The Sortes Astrampsychi give us back a divination without temples and without ecstasy, made of paper, numbers and concrete questions. To read them today is to listen to the voices of ordinary people who entrusted the uncertainties of their lives to a book, from small quarrels between neighbours to life's greatest fears.