After intense study, Australian researchers have cracked the code of an Egyptian spellbook that had been an enigma for roughly 1,300 years.
The spellbook, a parchment codex, is written in Coptic. The researchers studied the book's language and drawings and discovered that it contained "a series of invocations and spells," Live Science reports.
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While the code has been cracked, other details about the spellbook still remain a mystery: Choat and Gardner aren't sure who, exactly, was using the spellbook, and they're also unsure where the codex is from — the university obtained it from an antiquities dealer in 1981. The codex is now at the Museum of Ancient Cultures at Macquarie University.
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