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…
“It is only on the step, in the gateway, the entrance, the vestibule, the space between the outside and the inner chamber, between the sacred and the common, that we may ordinarily tarry with our friends.”
With these words Goethe paraphrases the title of his journal “Propylaea”, which he edited from 1798 to 1800. The title is a programmatic statement: the journal is meant to be a place of…
The research project “Hebräisches und aramäisches Lexikon zu den Texten vom Toten Meer - Qumran-Lexikon” is one of the most important manuscript finds of the 20th century. Between 1947 and 1956 remains of about 1000 scrolls were discovered in caves near the ruined settlement of Chirbet Qumran on the western shore of the Dead Sea, mainly in Hebrew and Aramaic languages. The manuscripts date from…
The foundation of modern Nepal, which until 2007 was styled as the 'only Hindu kingdom (of the world)', goes back to the middle of the 18th century when Pṛthvīnārāyaṇa Śāha, King of Gorkha, started expanding his dominion. Conquering many petty states, such as the rich Malla kingdoms of Kathmandu Valley in 1768/69, the Shah kings soon ruled over a large territory, which subsequently developed into…
The research project is supervised by an institution of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Its objective is the establishment of a tripartite analytic-semantic handbook, which essentially provides a new foundation for the history of towns and urbanization during the premodern period. Additionally, it constitutes an important instrument for a multitude of historically oriented…
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) is with Fichte and Hegel one of the most important representatives of German Idealism. The Historical-Critical Edition of Schelling’s Works presents Schelling’s works, his posthumous papers, transcripts and letters in three series (I: published works, II: unpublished works and notes, III: Letters from and to Schelling). The edited texts are being…
The project “Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya (TWKM)” is funded with 5,42 Million Euros and is set to run for 15 years. It is located at the institute for Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology of the University Bonn. The project manager is Professor Dr. Nikolai Grube, who is an internationally renowned expert in the field of Maya research and a member of the North…
Human evolution is a story of expansions. During the last two million years the genus Homo spread from Africa into Asia and Europe in several waves of migration. New species developed and old groups became extinct (range expansions). As early as three million years ago, hominins had established new ways of dealing with their specific environment through culture. Stone tools produced with the help…
Three competing Reformation paradigms emerged in the city of Strasbourg, the duchy of Württemberg (with Tübingen university), and the Electoral Palatinate (with the university of Heidelberg) in the second half of the sixteenth century: an “upper German”, a Lutheran, and a Reformed model, respectively. Each of the three emphasized its distinctiveness, but was inevitably influenced by the other two.…
The staff of the project “Turfanforschung” edits central Iranian and old Turkic texts from the Turfanian text corpus (Turfansammlung). The texts of the “Turfansammlung” originated from the Central Asian oases along the silk road and date from the 7th to the 14th century CE. In the year 1902, the former Prussian Academy of Sciences received a considerable amount of texts from an expedition to East…
The project aims at an in-depth analysis and presentation of the scientific relations between Germany and the Russian Empire in chemistry, pharmacy, and medicine in the 19th century. Such a scientific study is not yet available. The research of german-russian scientific relations for the given period will provide insights into the development of science in Germany and Russia at that time as well…