CSMC Newsletter

The Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara houses a particularly important collection of cuneiform clay tablets. They come from various historical sites in Anatolia, including Hattusa and Kültepe, one of the earliest cuneiform archives in the region. This month, it is the second job site for ENCI, the world’s first mobile CT scanner to look inside sealed cuneiform tablets. The ENCI team has been busy scanning contracts, legal documents, and private letters. Moreover, they have also tried the method on several human bones kept in the Kayseri Museum to understand different pathologies.

This winter semester, we proudly present the third edition of our Equal Opportunity Lecture Series. Starting on 14 October, ‘Written Artefacts across World Regions’ brings together materials and perspectives from all over the globe and to shed light on the connections – the similarities, entanglements, but also incommensurabilities – that emerge when we look at research on artefacts from different regions or informed by different scholarly and conservation traditions as well as by different cultural and political contexts. For the first time, the series also includes lectures in Arabic, French, and Spanish (which will be interpreted into English).

This winter semester, Maya Stiller from the University of Kansas is the visiting professor for ‘Gender in Manuscript Cultures’ at the CSMC. In our interview, she provides insights into her multidisciplinary research, which lies in the unique intersection between art history, Korean Studies, and Buddhist Studies, and she talks about her plans while in Hamburg. On Thursday, 28 November 2024, 6:15 pm, she will deliver a public lecture on current themes from her work. Stay tuned for further details!

Under the signature number 129 A 10, the Royal Library in The Hague houses a particularly valuable manuscript: the Lancelot collection. This medieval codex contains multiple Middle Dutch texts that revolve around the figure of Lancelot and the Arthurian legend. The Lancelot collection is written on parchment; several folios are palimpsests with texts that are no longer legible. Marjolein Hogenbirk from the University of Amsterdam contacted the Mobile Lab to have the Lancelot collection examined with multispectral imaging. Ivan Shevchuk and Kyle Ann Huskin recently travelled to Den Haag to apply this method and reconstruct the lost writing on this spectacular manuscript.

During the monsoon season, palaeoecologist and molecular biologist Anastasia Poliakova visited the Kerala Manuscript Preservation Centre (KMPC) in Thrissur, India, where the CSMC is currently implementing the Digitisation and Preservation of Kerala Archives (DiPiKA) project. Anastasia had originally come to India as part of another ongoing CSMC project, conducting fieldwork in South India for the Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative (PLMPI). During her stay, she visited Pondicherry, Thanjavur and Thrissur, where she met the DiPiKA team. One of the main aims of her visit was to collect samples for her palaeoecological and molecular analyses to determine the identity and origin of palm-leaf manuscripts.

With the J. P. Gumbert Dissertation Award 2024, the CSMC honours the best doctoral thesis defended between 1 January 2023 and 31 August 2024 that contributes to any aspect of the study of manuscripts and other written artefacts. Its research focus can be on any period or region. Included in the award is a prize money of 5,000 Euro and fellowship for a research stay at CSMC. The deadline to submit nominations is 15 November, 12:00 pm (noon).

Leopold Jessner was a leading theatre director of the Weimar Republic. ‘Die Temperamente des Theaters’, an UWA exhibition at the Hamburg State and University library, presents the staging books from his time at Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre for the first time. On 24 September, we celebrated the opening of the exhibition with introductory talks by the curators, Martin Jörg Schäfer and Anna Sophie Felser, and a reception. The exhibition is open until 27 October.

Computational palaeography is an emerging interdisciplinary field at the intersection of computer vision, instrumental analytics, and palaeography – the study of ancient scripts and their physical mediums. On 31 August 2024, the 3rd Workshop on Computational Palaeography took place as part of the 18th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) in Athens. It was organised by Hussein Mohammed, Principal Investigator of ‘Similarity Measurement of Visual Patterns in Written Artefacts’ at the CSMC, and Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello (Universität Basel).

The video series on the ‘Written Artefacts of Nepal – Preservation and Documentation’ shows how valuable manuscripts can be cared for, and how they should be stored and protected in order to preserve them. After a manuscript has been cleaned (episode 11) and wrapped in a piece of lokta paper (episode 12), it should additionally be wrapped up in an unbleached muslin cover, matching the size of the manuscript. In the latest video of the series, Biddur Bhattarai shows how this is done.

When researchers in Graz announced in the early summer of 2023 that they had found a fragment of a 2,300-year-old codex, it was a scoop – it would be by far the oldest fragment of a codex in the world. But is the ‘Graz Mummy Book’ really one? To get closer to answering this question, the famous object was brought to the Mobile Lab in late August. The members of our lab team were the first researchers ever to carry out a material analysis of this manuscript. Read more about the background of this fascinating written artefact and the Mobile Lab’s engagement with it in our blog.