Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; List of contributors; Part I. The Tablet Texts: 1. Who are you? A brief history of the scholarship Radcliffe G. Edmonds III; 2. The 'Orphic' gold tablets - texts and translations, with critical apparatus and tables Radcliffe G. Edmonds III; Part II. Texts and Contexts: 3. Text and ritual: the corpus eschatologicum of the Orphics Fritz Graf; 4. Are the Orphic gold leaves Orphic? Alberto Bernabé and Ana Jiménez San Cristobal; 5. 'A Child Of Earth Am I And Of Starry Heaven' concerning the anthropology of man in the Orphic gold tablets Hans Dieter Betz (translated by Maria Sturm); 6. Common motifs in the 'Orphic' B tablets and Egyptian funerary texts: continuity or convergence? Thomas M. Dousa; 7. Centre, periphery, or peripheral centre: a Cretan connection for the gold lamellae of Crete Yannis Tzifopoulos; Part III. Semiotic and Narrative Analyses: 8. 'Orphic' invocations and commentaries: funerary transpositions of religious discourse Claude Calame (translated by Sarah Melker); 9. Initiation - death - underworld: narrative and ritual in the gold leaves Christoph Riedweg; 10. Sacred scripture or oracles for the dead: the semiotic situation of the 'Orphic' gold tablets Radcliffe G. Edmonds III; 11. Dialogues of immortality from the Iliad to the golden leaves Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui; 12. Poetry and performance in the Orphic gold leaves Dirk Obbink; 13. Rushing into milk: new perspectives on the gold tablets Christopher Faraone; Index; Index locorum; Bibliography of scholarship on the tablets.

Promotional Information

Examines new methodologies used in the study of these tablets. Includes an updated edition and translation of the tablet texts.

About the Author

Radcliffe G. Edmonds III is an Associate Professor in the Department of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College. He is the author of Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes and the 'Orphic' Gold Tablets (Cambridge University Press, 2004).