CSMC Newsletter

Kairouan is home to what scholars of Islamic written culture consider the oldest near-intact library of Islamic manuscripts in the world. The collection of the National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts (NLPCPM), a division of the National Heritage Institute (NHI), is one of the largest in North Africa and one of the most historically and intellectually important collections of Islamic religious and literary manuscripts worldwide. Regrettably, several parchment manuscripts in the NLPCPM’s collection are affected by a form of degradation that is unfamiliar to even experienced manuscript conservators. In late 2024, a delegation from Tunisia brought 15 objects to Hamburg and analysed them together with the experts of the Artefact Lab.

Across time and space, and for a range of reasons and motives, humans have been establishing practices and media for cultivating and presenting knowledge about past and present kin. The new volume of SMC is about one of the most important material manifestations of this knowledge: handwritten artefacts. Genealogical Manuscripts in Cross-Cultural Perspective is the first book to juxtapose studies from a wide variety of such cultures, ranging from East Asia, to West and Central Asia, to Europe. Tracing one’s lineage usually required taking note of personal histories, biographies, and relationships. The volume deals with the many different reasons that compelled both individuals and institutions to do just this, and highlights the various contexts in which genealogy-writing occurred.

In 1900, the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu was carrying out restoration work in the Mogao caves, a spectacular cave temple outside the Chinese city of Dunhuang. By chance, he made a sensational discovery: in ‘Mogao Cave Seventeen’, he found around 50,000 manuscripts from the 5th to 11th centuries, including thousands of copies of the Sutra of Limitless Life. Today, around 1,500 of them are held in the British Library. In a new volume of SMC, Brandon Dotson and Lewis Doney take a careful look at this collection and show that examining a large set of seemingly interchangeable manuscripts can reveal numerous fascinating issues.

In December 2024, Leila Amineddoleh, a lawyer, teacher, and scholar specialising in art and cultural heritage law, spent several days at the CSMC to meet with and talk to researchers at the Cluster, give a seminar for graduate students, and deliver a Thursday Lecture on ‘The ABCs of Art and Cultural Heritage Law’. During her visit, we talked to her about her work, the advice she has for researchers dealing objects of unclear provenance, and the specific issues that arise in the case of written cultural heritage.

The Middle East Medievalists (MEM) are an international association of scholars interested in the study of the medieval Middle East. Each year the MEM Board of Directors presents the Lifetime Achievement Award to a scholar who has served the field of medieval Middle Eastern Studies with distinction. In December 2024, this prestigious award was given to Jürgen Paul, member of ‘Creating Originals’ and ‘Archiving Artefacts’ at UWA. Congratulations!

EU Research is a quarterly publication disseminating the latest research and news across a broad range of scientific fields. In the winter 2024 edition, you can find an extensive piece on the CSMC and UWA. ‘A deeper picture of written artefacts’ (pages 36–41 in the current volume) gives both a general overview of the research agenda of our Cluster and looks at some specific projects as well. The volume is available open access.

The Miscellaneous Collection Reports (MCR) in the Library & Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, west of London, consist of over 770 volumes with thousands of folios, organised in scrapbooks, holding almost every kind of archival document imaginable: handwritten notes, drawings, maps, newspaper cut-outs, and typewritten or manuscript letters from all over the world. In the archive’s own words, the MCR provides ‘an essential resource for exploring the central role of Kew in the colonial and global networks of economic botany and scientific activity, 1850–1928’. Among all these documents, a single-leaf letter of only 13 lines immediately caught the attention of PhD researcher Jannis Kostelnik, who writes about this object in the most recent article of our Artefact of the Month series.

Robots, Covid-19, agriculture – AI scientist Mahdi Jampour has already dealt with a colourful range of topics in his career. In this interview, he talks about his background and his current research at the CSMC. Among other things, he explains how his background in recovering facial information from non-frontal images helped him and his colleagues managed to reconstruct the undertexts on Georgian palimpsests.