CSMC Newsletter

On 6 April, the ‘Prague Express’ container ship left the port of Hamburg heading for the open sea. On board were seven containers labelled ‘UWA/CSMC’. After long and intensive preparations, our Container Lab is now on its way to Puducherry, India, where members of the ‘Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative’, including Giovanni Ciotti, Marina Creydt, Markus Fischer, and Anastasia Poliakova, will be analysing historical palm leaf manuscripts from Tamil Nadu. The containers are expected to arrive in India on 10 May.

On 3 April, we celebrated the opening of the latest research institute at Universität Hamburg: Led by Ralf Möller, the Centre for Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) has set out to deepen our understanding of how research on AI and research in the humanities can benefit from one another. CHAI has strong ties to our Cluster: The Research Field on ‘Data Linking’, also run by Möller and his colleagues, brings in expertise from computer science into the research on written artefacts. Also, the new institute is based in one of our buildings in Warbrugstraße 28, so we will see, talk to, and work with one another on a regular basis.

For decades, a German-Nepalese initiative captured thousands of manuscripts from Nepal’s written heritage on microfilm. Still, more than 20 years after the project's completion, the National Archives lacked access to some of the documents. With the help of CSMC, the gap has now been closed. In cooperation with Berlin State Library and the DFG, we digitised the microfilms of the so-called ‘X series’, consisting of around 700 manuscripts. During a ceremony on 17 March 2024, Bidur Battharai, who coordinates the ‘Preserving the Written Cultural Heritage of Nepal’ project, handed over a digital copy of the data to representatives of the National Archives.

Contemporary urban tagging is, by far, the most prevalent and widely practiced form of calligraphy in history. This May, a workshop on the theory and practice of tagging provides a unique opportunity to gain insights into a vibrant cultural mass phenomenon. ‘The Calligraphy of Tagging’ is aimed at anyone with an interest in calligraphy, graffiti, and street signatures. No previous experience or knowledge is needed. Participation is free of charge. The course will be taught by Javier Abarca, a researcher, teacher, and critic in the fields of graffiti and street art, and organiser of the TAG Conference.

The seminars of the new series on ‘Persianate Written Artefacts’, organised by Shervin Farridnejad, aim to engage Persian, Dari, and Tojiki-speaking students and scholars with the research methodologies and concepts of written artefacts developed at the CSMC. The first seminar of the series, ‘Studying the Seals on Iranian Manuscripts During the Islamic Period’, took place on 18 and 19 March. Taught by Emad Sheykh-ol-Hokamaee (University of Teheran), it introduced a crucial component of manuscripts and archival documents produced in Iran, playing a significant role in various domains, particularly in authenticating legal deeds and tracing ownership.

This summer semester, an online seminar conducted by Said Aljoumani provides Arabic-speaking students and scholars with an opportunity to familiarise themselves with the research approach to written artefacts developed at the CSMC. In the course of 13 lectures, the participants learn about manuscript notes, audition certificates, seals, the history of library and book collections, and many other things. Spots for the seminar were in high demand and the course was fully booked shortly after it had been announced.

After their return from Paris, where they examined cuneiform tablets from the Louvre collection in February, the members of our ‘ENCI’ project (‘Extracting Non-Destructively Cuneiform Inscriptions’) got visitors in their lab in Hamburg: a local TV team of Norddeutscher Rundfunk filmed a report for the ‘Hamburg Journal’. In the programme, several researchers involved in the project explain how they are working together in this unusual combination of Assyriology, X-ray physics, and computer science, what they have discovered at the Louvre and what they are up to next.

In her ‘Mesopotamian Bulletins’, the Assyriologist Cécile Michel blogs about a rich and manifold past culture that still has a lot to tell us today. We regularly translate selected entries of this blog into English. Three new episodes are now available. They deal with the archives that the ancient Mesopotamians built and how they were organised, a newly discovered and yet undeciphered language, and personal seals, which were invented even before the cuneiform script. All blog entries that have thus far been translated into English are available on our website.