The research project “Die frühbuddhistischen Handschriften aus Gandhāra: religiöse Literatur an der Schnittstelle von Indien, Zentralasien und China” was established in 2012. On the basis of philological and historical methods, it provides new insight into the early history of Buddhism on its way to becoming a world religion. The project studies manuscripts found in the 1990s in northern Pakistan…
The reciprocal word pair “Forschungskontinuität und Kontinuitätsforschung” (continuity of research and research of continuity) in the project-title outlines the significant difficulties and opportunities of the traditional, but not unproblematic history of the archaeological sciences in landscapes, that are very rich in findings and important for the development of northern and eastern Europe.…
The project “Galen als Vollender, Interpret und Vermittler der antiken Medizin” edits, translates, and comments on medical texts by Galen, which - from today’s perspective - are in the field of tension between the natural sciences and the humanities.
Galen von Pergamon, who worked in Rome in the 2nd century CE as medical advisor to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, became with his extensive oeuvre the…
The name of Dionysius the Areopagite refers to the Athenian, who according to Acts 17:34 was converted by St. Paul’s speech on the Areopagus and then followed him. The name was adopted by a prolific unknown author around 500 A.D., with a vast number of writings based on the tremendous influence of his synthesizing of neo-platonic philosophy and Christian theology. The manuscript tradition is a…
The Egyptian-Coptic language is the human language with the longest documented lifetime, clocking at 4,500 years prior to its extinction. Its vocabulary reflects the knowledge and worldviews of one of the formative cultures of the ancient world. In order to explore the linguistic and cultural evidence of this historical episteme, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and…