CSMC Newsletter

A 4000-year-old receipt for flour, written in cuneiform in clay; a complete Qur’an, only a few centimetres in size; a hastily revised promptbook that played a key role an infamous theatre scandal: written artefacts come in countless forms, and each has its own story. Employing 20 particularly noteworthy written artefacts from the holdings of the Hamburg State Library, the exhibition 'Hamburgs Schriftschätze: Neue Fragen an alte Manuskripte' will show how researchers at the Cluster reveal these stories and develop overarching approaches to understanding written artefacts from all eras and places. It will be on display from 5 July to 2 October, a festive opening takes places at 5:00 pm on 4 July.

At the Bodleian Library in Oxford, two members of the Cluster made a remarkable find: written on the pages of a miniature Qur’an, they found an encrypted message from the 16th century. Patiently, they decoded the encrypted text – with a surprising result. What they could now read turned out to be an eulogy to several well-known personalities of 16th-century England, including Thomas More and his daughter Margaret. Their work on this remarkable manuscript has recently been published.

They occupy a total of 120 metres on the shelves and comprise over 700,000 pages: The National Library of Israel and CSMC have digitised 24 written estates of German-Jewish intellectuals from the 19th and 20th century. A workshop from 5 to 7 June will provide first insights into the possibilities this opens up for research. In addition to the workshop, an evening event (in German) on 6 June at 6:30 pm in the Warburg-Haus will focus on particularly remarkable finds in the digitised archives, which include the estates of such important personalities as Oskar Baum, Gerschom Scholem, and Martin Buber.

Since 2017, the annual conference 'TAG: Name Writing in Public Space' brings together leading figures in graffiti research and from the scene itself. This year, as part of the exhibition 'EINE STADT WIRD BUNT' ('A City Bexomes Colourful'), the conference is coming to Hamburg with the support of CSMC. The three-day event will open on 29 June 2023 at 5:00 pm in the Lichthof of the Hamburg State Library, including a public keynote by renowned archaeologist Matthew Champion. On 30 June 2023 and 1 July 2023, the conference will continue with German and English lectures at the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte.

Two researchers, one hour, one topic: by bringing together different areas of expertise, the Digital Lunch Seminar Series brings the idea of cross-disciplinary research to life. On four Mondays in June and July, two researchers from CSMC and collaborating institutions will deliver one-hour presentations on a joint research topic. On 12 June, the archaeologist Christof Berns and the mineralogist Stelios Aspiotis will open the programme by reporting on their joint analyses of rock-based written artefacts in Miletus, one of the most important cities in Mediterranean antiquity.

Nepal is home to exceptionally diverse manuscript collections, both in terms of scripts and languages as well as materials used. In short videos, Bidur Bhattarai explains how these collections are preserved. The latest episode of the series shows a Buddhist manuscript bearing witness to the longstanding tradition of knowledge exchange between Nepal and Tibet and their deep cultural and religious connection, in particular between Lhasa and the Kathmandu valley.

Writing a large book by hand was still a common practice in the Middle East of the early twentieth century – but not for teenagers. A note in an Arabic manuscript now kept at the Göttingen University Library claims that the book was written by a twelve-year-old. How can we know if this true?

On 11 and 12 May, the auditorium of Deichtorhallen Hamburg turned into an experimental site. The set-up included six artists and 14 scholars, plus a diverse audience consisting of members of the university and the general public. They gathered for an event that was at the same time an academic conference and an exhibition, featuring performances, panel discussions, and artist talks. In our latest blog post, we look back at our recent event 'Beyond Visualising Language'.