CSMC Newsletter

A new episode of the popular science programme Terra X takes an in-depth look at the undisclosed secrets of historical writings and written artefacts, and several researchers from the CSMC appear in the programme: Cécile Michel, Christian Schroer, and the ENCI team explain the mobile computer tomograph they used to look inside sealed Mesopotamian clay envelopes containing cuneiform tablets for the first time; and in the rooms of the Artefact Lab, the film crew captured insights into the CSMC’s cross-disciplinary work. The programme is available in the ZDF Media Library.

The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS) at the University of Pennsylvania and the CSMC have launched a new joint fellowship that gives researchers the chance to work intensively with manuscript collections in both Philadelphia and Hamburg. Fellows will spend one month at SIMS exploring premodern manuscripts at Penn Libraries and other collections in the Philadelphia area, followed by up to three months at the CSMC working on the same manuscript or set of manuscripts. The fellowship is designed to encourage cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of manuscripts and is open to scholars who live outside the greater Philadelphia area and who are not affiliated with the University of Hamburg. We welcome applications by 1 May 2026.

In October 2026, the MA ‘Manuscript Cultures’ will be relaunched as an extended two-year programme. Building on the strong track record of the previous one-year format, it offers students more time to develop their own research profile while maintaining its established focus on global written artefacts. The new curriculum integrates the programme’s core areas with newly introduced modules, such as ‘Cultural Heritage and Ethics in Manuscript Research’ and new modules from the computer sciences. The application period is now open and runs until 31 March.

Following their initial fieldwork in Kaduna in November 2025, researchers from the Ajami Lab have continued their work on the Jos Museum manuscript collection deposited at the Kaduna Museum in Nigeria. Together with their Nigerian colleagues, Dmitry Bondarev and Maria Luisa Russo focused on two main tasks during their current trip: they established a set of cataloguing and research procedures for identifying Ajami, that is, African languages written in Arabic script; and they reviewed principles of conservation and the management of manuscript in the collection. This work forms part of our broader engagement in cultural heritage preservation.

Until recently, the mobile CT scanner ENCI was used primarily to read sealed clay cuneiform tablets. Its applications, however, have broadened considerably. In a study published in Digital Kartvelology, an open‑access journal devoted to digital approaches in Georgian studies, Philipp Paetzold, Samaneh Ehteram, Andreas Schropp, Christian Schroer, and Jost Gippert, together with colleagues from the University of Heidelberg, employed ENCI to examine the internal structures of historical codices. The same issue includes additional contributions from members of the DeLiCaTe project (The Development of Literacy in the Caucasian Territories) as well as from Sebastian Bosch and Eka Kvirkvelia, who report on systematic ink analyses of Georgian collections in Graz and Leipzig.

A new study from the Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative at the CSMC showcases how infrared spectroscopy (DRIFTS), combined with principal component analysis, can be used as a powerful fingerprinting tool for the analysis of palm-leaf manuscripts. By examining eleven manuscripts, the authors demonstrate that it is possible to extract manuscript-specific signals that allow both the taxonomic identification of the palm species used and a differentiation of their geographical origins within South and Southeast Asia. This publication marks an important methodological milestone for the project’s broader agenda: it confirms that non‑ or minimally invasive material analyses can generate robust profiles that support the authentication, provenance study, and interpretation of palm‑leaf manuscripts.

Congratulations to Stephan Seifert! The CSMC researcher recently completed his tenure process and has taken up a regular professorship in the Department of Chemistry on 1 March. Being a part of the CSMC since 2020, his research is located at the interface between method development and validation of chemometric and bioinformatics methods and their practical application on spectrometric, spectroscopic, and sequence data in various research areas. At the Cluster, he led a project on the ‘Bioinformatic Profiling of Written Artefacts’, and he is also a member of the Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative (PLMPI).