CSMC Newsletter

What are the stories behind the Jewish cultural artefacts in the MARKK Museum’s collection? A new exhibition this late summer explores this question. In preparation for it, Ümit Güder, a CSMC researcher specialising in archaeometallurgy and materials analysis, has carried out material science analyses on several objects. Among the objects analysed were a Seder plate, a seven-branched candelabrum, and two Hanukkah lamps in the form of banks. Together, they represent different forms of Jewish ceremonial metalwork, and each posed its own technical and conservation-related questions. To answer them, Ümit carried out portable X-ray fluorescence analysis directly on site at the museum.

Manipravalam is a hybrid language that flourished in medieval South India between the 12th and 15th centuries. Despite its importance, there has hardly been any research on this language outside of India. The main reason for this is its daunting complexity and the breadth of expertise required for its analysis. At the end of 2025, Suganya Anandakichenin won a prestigous ERC Consolidator Grant to develop the first comprehensive scholarly study of Manipravalam. This month, MIRA (‘Manipravalam: Insight, Research, and Analysis’) officially gets going. Shortly after she had received the confirmation of the grant, we spoke to her about her plans for the next five years.

The Fondazione Biblioteca Capitolare and the CSMC have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that establishes their collaboration on a new foundation. The partnership will focus particularly on the study of palimpsests, which are of extraordinary value for reconstructing the transmission of texts and the history of writing practices. The expertise of members of both institutions will enable a dialogue that brings together philology, palaeography, codicology, and material analysis, and extending to the most recent digital and multispectral research methodologies.

The Professor of Arabic language and culture at Leiden University has received one of the highest honours in the Dutch academic system. Petra Sijpesteijn’s research focuses on the social and political history of the early Islamic world, drawing on a vast corpus of often neglected documentary papyri and other manuscripts to recover the experiences of Muslims and non-Muslims living under Islamic rule. Examining the transition from the late antique Byzantine and Egyptian systems to an Arab–Muslim state, she explores how new Islamic institutions built on, transformed, and sometimes disrupted earlier structures. Sijpesteijn has been a member of the CSMC Advisory Board since 2021.

At the heart of the ancient metropolis of Miletus stood a spectacular fountain. Among its rich ornamentation was a long inscription. It not only reveals that the structure dates from the Roman Imperial period (1st century BCE to 3rd century CE), but also sheds light on some of the circumstances under which it was built. The messages conveyed through the architecture and inscriptions are, however, contradictory and apparently directed at different groups of recipients. In the most recent episode of our Artefact of the Month series, Classical Archaeologist Christof Berns tells its story. 

The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg is often described as the end of the age of handwriting. Ondřej Škrabal, however, argues that the distinction between the handwritten and the printed is far less clear-cut. To this day, the two remain dynamically intertwined. ‘”Printing” often makes people think first of books, movable type, and the European story of the press. We want to use a wider term that also includes seals, coins, castings, rubbings, woodblocks, lithographic stones, and other forms of reproduction by pressure or impression. We believe that the notion of “imprinted handwriting”, much like that of the “written artefact”, can be very helpful in establishing a common vocabulary for a range of phenomena that have often been considered in isolation.’

In the 2026 summer semester, Muna Abubeker is guest professor for ‘African Manuscript Cultures’ at the CSMC. In our interview, the Ethiopian Arabic and Ajami manuscript specialist talks about her unconventional route into academia and her plans to raise the international profile of her research field. On 21 May, she delivered a well-attended lecture at the CSMC, after which she received the award that is connected to her guest professorship. The image above shows her with Martin-Jörg Schäfer, head of Equity & Diversity at the CSMC (left), and CSMC director Konrad Hirschler (right).

By Martina Stoye and Peera Panarut 

The ‘Book of the Three Worlds’ (‘Traiphum’; inv. no. II 650, Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin) is one of the most beautiful, oldest and magnificent manuscripts on Buddhist cosmology from Thailand. The thirty-three-metre long leporello manuscript was commissioned by King Taksin of Thonburi in 1776 from four royal painters and four royal scribes. In 2023, the Berlin museum programme CoMuse allowed collaborative research to be carried out of its images and texts. This book is the outcome of the joint research by the two authors. It focuses on a six-metre-long section of the manuscript: the idyllic and secluded world of the Himavanta forest with its beautiful lakes, animals and plants, the course of the southern stream from the Himavanta forest to the human world and the many Jātakas (pre-birth stories of the Buddha) situated therein. The authors not only analyse the interplay of text and image in the manuscript, but also explore the connections between what is depicted here and other textual traditions of Thailand.

By Sowmeya Sathiyamani, Grzegorz Nehring, Olivier Bonnerot, Giuseppe Marotta, Sebastian Bosch, Ivan Shevchuk, Kyle Ann Huskin, Eugenio Garosi, and Claudia Colini

This study investigates the inks employed in Arabic papyri from early Islamic Egypt, preserved across five collections in Europe. The analysis encompassed several sub‑types of documentary texts to explore potential correlations between ink composition, document function, and context of production, with particular emphasis on papyrus protocols: texts written on the outermost sheet of the papyrus roll providing information relevant to its production. A non-invasive methodology, featuring a combination of two-colour digital microscopy, infrared reflectography and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy was employed to analyse the inks, which were then classified as either carbon-based or iron-gall inks.

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)