The subject of the interdisciplinary project, which combines egyptological research with methods from computer philology, consists of the ancient Egyptian scripts called Hieratic and cursive hieroglyphic script, both having been used alongside monumental hieroglyphic script for over 3000 years. The inventory of signs taken from selected texts is systematically and digitally recorded with different…
From 2012 to 2025, the project explores the beginning and end of the Roman era in the central Alpine region. Through excavation projects in Pfaffenhofen (North Tyrol) and San Martino/San Silvestro (Trentino), the project opens up new archaeological source material from two important transitional periods. In Pfaffenhofen-Hörtenberg, the largest Iron Age settlement in North Tyrol is being…
The research project is dedicated to the material appearance of ancient cities, which is investigated as a mirror as well as a formative component of social structures and processes. Furthermore, the commission develops and supports projects on the archaeology of ancient cities and the testing of interdisciplinary methods.
Die Forschungsstelle befasste sich mit der Entwicklung und Anwendung naturwissenschaftlicher Untersuchungsverfahren für archäologisch-kulturhistorische Themen mit den Arbeitsschwerpunkten physikalische Datierung und holozäne Landschaftsrekonstruktion.
Mit Lumineszenz lassen sich an gebrannten Artefakten der Erhitzungszeitpunkt sowie an Sedimenten das Ablagerungsalter bestimmen. Dies erlaubt die…
The systematic research into the Ethiopian manuscript culture is the aim of the long-term project “Die Schriftkultur des christlichen Äthiopiens und Eritreas: Eine multimediale Forschungsumgebung” (“Beta maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea”). Ethiopia and Eritrea are situated, from the perspective of cultural history, both at the periphery of the so-called Christian Orient and in the…
The aim of the project described below is to develop two fundamental desiderata of Koranic research: an edition of the Koranic text that meets critical standards and a comprehensive commentary on the Koran that consistently interprets it in the context of its historical context of origin. In contrast to the Kairen Koran edition of 1923, which is currently widespread, the project presented here is…
In the project "Prehistoric Bronze Finds" (PBF), which has been funded by the German Research Foundation since 1966 and passed into the care of the Academy at the beginning of 2002, the Copper, Bronze and Early Iron Age finds from the end of the 4th to the middle of the 1st millennium B.C. from Central Europe and its mainly eastern peripheral regions, as far as they consist of copper or bronze,…
The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum contains the Latin inscriptions from the entire space of the former Roman Empire in a geographical and systematic order; since its foundation by Theodor Mommsen, it has been the authoritative documentation of the epigraphic heritage of Roman antiquity. Today, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum has about 180,000 inscriptions and supplementary volumes with plates…
As part of the Union Académique Internationale’s research project launched in 1921, the Interacademic Commission for the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (CVA) publishes the holdings of Greek, Etruscan, and Italian antique clay vessels in German museums. The time frame covers the period from the Minoan-Mycenaean to the Hellenistic period, i. e. from about 1500 BCE to the beginning of Common Era. However,…
The festival texts are the most extensive but also the least investigated group of cuneiform texts from Hittite Anatolia. At the same time, among the ancient Near Eastern cultures, they also offer a uniquely dense documentation of the cult system and its state administration. The aim of the project is an editorial reconstruction of the corpus, accessible in the form of web-based text editions.…
The DaSCH is a data and service centre for research data in the humanities, which the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences has been operating since 2017 as a national institution in cooperation with the University of Basel. The central coordination office is located at the Digital Humanities Lab of the University of Basel under the direction of Prof. Dr. Lukas Rosenthaler. For the first…
Headed by Prof. Dr. Christian Leitz, Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IANES), Department of Egyptology, this research project’s aim is the analysis of the contents of the so-called temple texts which form ancient Egypt’s largest and (regardless of chronological and geographical differences) cohesive textual corpus. Most striking about this corpus besides its extent and frequently…
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 Coptic-Sahidic Bible is one of the most important literary witnesses of Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean. The Coptic Old Testament, which essentially dates back to the 4th century, is one of the earliest and most extensive versions of the Greek Septuagint (LXX). The translation of the Bible into Coptic was source and inspiration for the entire Coptic-Christian literature of Egypt. In…
Roman stone architecture represents a unique treasure of cultural heritage that gives evidence of early forms of sustainable urbanity in Germany. However, most of it has survived as dislocated building elements (disiecta membra), whose existence so far has hardly been known, let alone published. The academy project therefore serves to index, link and evaluate this corpus of material (approx.…
The ancient Egyptian funerary texts are one of the most important and extensive literary areas of this culture. Three large collections of texts - roughly arranged according to time and place - define them: the pyramid texts of the Old Empire, the coffin texts of the Middle Empire and the Book of the Dead from the New Empire until the Roman times. In contrast to pyramid and coffin texts, the…
For some 3,500 years (34th century BC to 1st century AD), cuneiform served to document, preserve and disseminate intellectual content. The capacity for great cultural and political achievement found among the empires of the Near East was closely bound to the development and use of this medium.
Characteristic to the cultures of the ancient Near East is thus not in the least the extraordinary…
The Middle Ages were shaped by the separation in a Latin west and a Greek east, which still has an impact today. It also affected the law. The Justinian Corpus luris Civilis, which was almost forgotten over centuries in the west, was repeatedly translated into Greek in the law-courses in the sixth century. It remained present as basis for the rich and diverse legal literature of the Eastern Roman…
The project “Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg” (i.e. “Epigraphic Database Heidelberg”, or EDH for short) was established in 1986 with a duration of five years under the auspices of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Program, and further funded from 1991 onwards by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. Since 1993, it has been a research project at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences with a duration until 2020.…