CSMC Newsletter

It is an exceptional discovery: a sealed papyrus containing fragments of Homer’s Iliad, Book II — the famous ‘Catalogue of Ships’ — was found on a mummified individual at Oxyrhynchus, offering new insights into funerary practices in Roman Egypt. The papyrus had been placed on the body, covering the area between the chest and abdomen. The individual likely died in the first or second century CE. Leah Mascia, a specialist in the material written culture of Greco-Roman Egypt and a CSMC alumna, coordinated the research that led to the papyrus’s identification and reading. She worked with an interdisciplinary team that included conservator Margalida Munar and philologist Ignasi-Xavier Adiego. In an article on our website, she explains the ‘strikingly unconventional’ nature of the find, which received wide international media coverage this month.

On the southern edges of the Himalayas, in a rugged climate shaped by cold winters, monsoon rains, and sparse mountain soil, grows the Daphne shrub. In Nepal, it is known as lokta. Found at altitudes between 1,600 and 3,200 metres, this resilient plant has long provided the raw material for one of Nepal’s oldest living traditions: the craft of handmade lokta paper. However, this tradition is increasingly at risk. The work is physically demanding, involving long treks on steep paths and long hours of boiling and beating pulp under simple conditions. ‘Nepali Paper on the Edge’, a new documentary by archaeometrist and paper historian Agnieszka Helman-Ważny, takes viewers to the remote villages and communities that still produce Iokta paper to this day. She has been travelling extensively in this part of the world for years, documenting local practices and oral traditions before they potentially disappear forever.

In the 1980s, probably one of the largest known collections of parchment Qur’ans dating to the first centuries of Islamic history was restored in Sana’a, the capital of what was then North Yemen. This project was funded by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as part of its ‘Cultural Aid’ programme and aimed not only to restore the artefacts but also to train local restoration specialists. It was originally based at the University of Hamburg in the Department of Islamic Studies (Professor Albrecht Noth) before coordination was transferred to the University of Saarbrücken in 1986. For several years now, CSMC member Thomas Eich has been researching the history of this project using administrative records and interviews. A key figure in the project was the Göttingen-based conservator Günter Brannahl (d. 1986), who, through countless hours of overtime, undertook the complex task of transferring an entire manuscript conservation workshop from the FRG to Sanaa — despite adverse political, administrative, and infrastructural conditions — and supported its operations from Göttingen in the years that followed. In the course of Eich’s researching the project’s history, the University of Hamburg has received a collection of photographs from the estate of Günter Brannahl, which he took during several research trips to Yemen. The photographs depict Sana’a, the restoration workshop, manuscripts before and after restoration, as well as various regions of Yemen that Mr. Brannahl visited from Sana’a. They are now publicly accessible on the University of Hamburg’s collection portal, FUNDus.

The year 2025 ended on a high note for us: two of our researchers were awarded one of the highly coveted ERC grants, which they will use to carry out ambitious research projects at the CSMC over the next three years. One of them is the historian Márton Vér, whose project ‘Re-Centring Central Asia: A Global Microhistory of the Silk Road between the 9th and 15th Centuries’ (ReCent) officially launched this month. In it, he examines the previously overlooked role of Central Asian peoples, such as the Uyghurs, in the history of this complex supra-network. You can learn more about this topic in an interview, which we are linking to again to mark the project’s launch.

Interest in Ajami in West Africa is growing. During a recent field trip to Senegal, Dmitry Bondarev and his Ajami Lab team launched new collaborative projects, located manuscripts, mapped collections, and established additional partnerships. At the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) and Université Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD), the group found a number of Qur’anic manuscripts containing translations into Pular, a Senegalese variety of Fulfulde, which they will study further in their linguistic and exegetical contexts. They also made contact with the Department of Islamic Studies and Linguistics in the Faculty of Humanities at UCAD to explore opportunities for collaboration between UCAD and the CSMC.

What does a single library on Rhodes reveal about Ottoman book culture, manuscript transmission, and the intertwined histories of Greeks and Turks? Conversation in the Library / Kütüphanede Muhabbet is a monumental two-volume work that combines codicology, archival work, and cultural history to address this question. Including multiple contributions from CSMC researchers, it situates the library within Ottoman book culture and its wider historical context. The first volume examines the library’s development, manuscripts, catalogues, and social networks, including several contributions by CSMC researchers. The second traces Rhodes’ history from antiquity to the present, highlighting the library’s survival through political change.

Bringing together the humanities, natural sciences, and computer science in the study of written artefacts is integral to the research programme of the CSMC. The Digital Lunch Seminar Series exemplifies how this crossdisciplinary collaboration works in practice, featuring compact one-hour online sessions, jointly presented by at least two researchers from complementary fields, who have teamed up to address a specific research question on manuscripts or other written artefacts. This summer semester, the series is back with four talks on topics ranging from Japanese paper clothing the computational visual cataloguing of Rainer Maria Rilke’s notebooks. Everyone is welcome to join the online sessions starting on 1 June.

In Paris, a workshop co-organised by the École Pratique des Hautes Études–PSL (EPHE), the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), the CSMC, National Taiwan University (NTU), and the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l’Asie orientale (CRCAO) explored textual stability and variation in East Asian manuscript cultures through 19 talks across six panels, marking the first event after a new CSMC–EPHE Memorandum of Understanding. The workshop focused on the meanings and manifestations of ‘variation’ in written artefacts produced in East Asia, as well as on different forms of evidence for ‘textual stability’ across historical periods, material features, genres, scripts, and languages.

Digitisation and datafication are transforming how scholars engage with the ancient and medieval past. From deciphering damaged scrolls with artificial intelligence to building open‑access repositories of manuscripts, digital methods are reshaping the study, preservation, and public understanding of historical evidence. However, these advances also raise critical questions about data quality, cultural sensitivity, accessibility, and ownership. These issues call for sustained dialogue between humanists and technologists. An upcoming mini‑conference, co‑organised by Marina Sartori (CSMC) and Victoria G. D. Landau (University of Basel), will address these intersections of technology and tradition. ‘Distant Past(s) – Current Future(s): Digitization, Digital Objects and Datafication Approaches in Ancient and Medieval Studies’ offers a forum to exchange practices, challenges, and visions for the future of cultural heritage research.

On 23 April, the CSMC participated in Germany’s Girls’ Day and Boys’ Day, offering school students insight into manuscript research and related fields. Through hands-on activities, participants explored writing systems, materials, and interdisciplinary methods. Girls developed their own research questions, examined historical manuscripts, and experimented with AI tools, before creating pigments and writing on papyrus in an Egyptology workshop. Boys explored the history and role of libraries, tested digital tools, and engaged with theatre studies and Assyriology, including crafting cuneiform tablets. The programme combined humanities and sciences, highlighting collaboration across disciplines. 

According to popular history, when the Crusaders invaded Tripoli in 1109, they burned all the books in the city's famous library. Our Artefact of the Month, a fragile leaf recently discovered in the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum in Istanbul, calls this account into question. Konrad Hirschler fathoms the intricate story of this object. ‘The discovery of the folio in Istanbul not only challenges the narrative of the complete destruction of the Tripoli library but also reveals a much larger story of how books moved, survived, and were repeatedly reclaimed in times of war.’

By Omar Gamal Mohamed Ali, Said Aljoumani, and Konrad Hirschler

This article explores the intersection of archival practices, material philology, and administrative documentation in late Mamlūk and early Ottoman Damascus through an in-depth analysis of the codex as a site for document preservation. Challenging earlier assumptions about the absence of archival institutions and documentation in pre-Ottoman West Asia and North Africa, the authors propose a tripartite framework – transmediation, translocation, and book-born documents – to conceptualise the integration of documentary texts and artefacts into codices as a strategy of preservation. Particular attention is given to a protocol regulating trade and gender separation in the Shaykhī and Dahsha markets of Damascus, offering new insights into local governance, endowment management, and the social logics of documentation. The analysis demonstrates the codex’s role in preserving, transforming, and transmitting legal and administrative memory across the Mamlūk-Ottoman transition, moving beyond institutional, Eurocentric paradigms of the archive.

1 June: Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Małgorzata Grzelec, Laura Gallardo, and Elisa Barney Smith: How the Material Choice and Phenomenology of Handwriting Shaped Southeast Asian Scripts (12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)

1–3 June: Workshop: Knowledge, Kinship and Ancestors in Global and Historical Perspective

3 June: Papermaking in Mexico: Field Report and Library Donation (4:00 pm – 6:00 pm)

4 June: CSMC Keynote Lecture: Shari Boodts: Manuscripts as Witnesses to the Cultural Contexts and Material Conditions of Textual Transmission (3:00 pm – 4:30 pm)

15 June: Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Agnieszka Helman-Ważny and Małgorzata Grzelec: Milk, Brain, Blood: Proteinaceous Substances of Animal Origin Used in Tibetan Manuscript Production (12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)

16–17 June: UWA-DESY Workshop: Exploring Cultural Heritage with X-rays

25–26 June: Workshop: The Material Traditions of the Psalms

29 June: Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Sandra Richter and Hussein Mohammed: Computational Visual Cataloguing: A Case Study of Rilke’s Notebooks (12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)

6 July: Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Eike Großmann and Agnieszka Helman-Wazny: Japanese Paper Clothing (12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)

16 July: CSMC Keynote Lecture: Matthew Collins: Parchment as 11 Layers of Language (4:15 pm – 5:45 pm)

26 November: CSMC Keynote Lecture: Judith Schlanger (4:15 pm – 5:45 pm)