Amulet MS 5236

As such magical amulets are known to have been mass-produced, the existence of MS 5236 indicates that, despite the singularity of the foil, an inkless block printing process was practised in ancient Greece to a certain degree,[1][2] for texts of some length, beyond the examples known from Roman lead pipe inscriptions and the many types of stamps used to mark bricks and pottery with the maker's name and other details.

[4] Even though the Greek text is legible on the whole (see transcription on the right), much of it remains incomprehensible due to grammatical and syntactical peculiarities, such as they were frequent in magical amulets, and some letter sequences cannot be made any sense of.

[1] According to Montserrat, important characteristics of MS 5236 most closely correspond to the ephesia grammata, magic amulets whose incantatory words were supposedly fixed in writing on the cult statue of Artemis at Ephesus, and which were carried on the body to ward off harm.

Although these metal sheets circulated in the Greek world in huge numbers, only lead examples have survived, rendering the gold foil among the ephesia grammata unique.

[1][2] The entire process is reconstructed by Brekle as follows: First, the inscription's text was engraved with an iron stylus into an even copper or bronze block, with its letters facing the opposite direction and running from right to left.

In the second step, the inscribed side of the stamp block was placed on the plane gold sheet and sufficient pressure, either manually or by hammering onto a plate laid on top, was exerted from above to transmit the text.

Because it is a matter of mechanical necessity that the engraved letters appear with their raised double edges on the substrate as parallel, sunken lines when being printed, as can be observed on the amulet.