S 8 "best explains its wide popularity in the extant Coptic amulets, papyri, and ostraca, coming from Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia."11 Facts: Written as a "magic square," the sentence reads the same left to right, bottom to top, top to bottom, and backwards. Figure 36. The famous Pompeiian magic square. Saulem Meanings: • Asked for; desired. Origins: Saulem is the Latin form of the Hebrew name Saul, as in the Old Testament. Saulem appears as a charm in the Medieval tale "The Moon beam" (a.k.a. "The Foolish Thief ") written by Pedro Alfonso sometime after 1106.12 The author claimed to have translated his work from the Arabic. His story is "[p]art of the vast tradition of 'wisdom literature' going back to ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, [consisting] of ethical instruction, imparted in the form of philosophical disquisitions, maxims, and illustrative stories."1 In Literature: • "[F]irst I climb up to a roof, then I seize a moonbeam and immediately repeat seven times the magic word Saulem. Thanks to this extraordinarily marvelous word I'm able to descend to the garden on a moonbeam, I enter, and carry away everything of value that I find in the house. I return at 11 Miroslav Marcovich, Studies in Graeco-Roman Religions and Gnosticism (1988) 12 Stanley Appelbaum, Medieval Tales and Stories (2000) 1 Ibid.