“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…
Until the 17th century, the astronomical and astrological works of Claudius Ptolemaeus (2nd century CE) were central source texts for the scientific understanding of the world of Arabic-Islamic and Latin-Christian cultures. The project studies the Arabic and Latin versions of Ptolemy’s major works, the Almagest and the Tetrabiblos, the minor works and pseudepigrapha, as well as the extensive…
The Encyclopaedia for the Antiquity and Christianity (RAC) is a fundamental instrument for researching Late Antiquity. In interdisciplinary investigations, the “examination of Christianity with Antiquity” is investigated, which means the multifaceted examination process of Christian, Jewish, as well as pagan Antiquity and the accompanying transformations into late antique culture up to the 7th…
The aim of REGESTA IMPERII is to record all documented and historiographically documented activities of the Roman-German kings and emperors from the Carolingians up to Maximilian I. (approx. 751-1519) as well as of selected popes in the form of German “Regesten” (abstracts).
The starting point of the undertaking is strongly connected with the name of the Frankfurt municipal librarian Friedrich…
The objective of the project is to remedy two of the most serious desiderata from the long history of the research of the German language:
The German dialects have been investigated intensively for 180 years (Schmeller 1821). For the “modern regional languages”, i.e. the linguistic variation areas, which present the spoken everyday language of most of the members of the linguistic community in…
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 task of the project is the acquisition of sources in Germany from approx. 1600 to the middle of the 19th century, which are important for the music research. There are two departments in the German workgroup of RISM which regionally split up the source acquisition, on the one hand at the Saxon State and University Library Dresden and on the other hand at the Bavarian State Library.
The International Inventory of Musical Sources - Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) - is an international, non-profit organization which aims for comprehensive documentation of extant musical sources worldwide. These primary sources are manuscripts or printed music, writings on music theory, and libretti. They are housed in libraries, archives, monasteries, schools and private…
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…
During his lifetime, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was not only productive as a composer. He also worked literary as an author of dramatic text for his own musictheatrical oevre on the one side and, on the other side, journalistically as “commentator” of his own musical creative work as well as of the events in art, history, philosophy, religion, politics, and society at that time. The oevre - in…
The project „Robert Schumann's Poetic World (RSPW): Drama - Oratorio - Vocal Symphony - Literary Work: an historical-critical hybrid edition“ being carried out jointly within the Akademienprogramm by the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Leipzig, the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, and the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Munich, is an interdisciplinary…
The research project “Runische Schriftlichkeit in den germanischen Sprachen / Runic Writing in the Germanic Languages (RuneS)” investigates the oldest writing system in the Germanic languages, the runic script. As a means of communication this script was used in different variants in large regions of Europe (with centres in what is now Germany and the Netherlands, in Great Britain and…
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…
The early poetic anthologies of classical Tamil form part of the great literary heritage of mankind, even if they are still little known in the West. Just the first millennium comprises a tradition of erotic and heroic poetry, but also didactic, epic and devotional collections, along with a sophisticated systems of grammatical, poetical and lexicographical knowledge, which on the one hand was used…
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 task of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) project is to compile the first comprehensive scholarly dictionary of ancient Latin from its beginnings until 600 CE. The work is based on an archive of approximately 10 million slips, which takes account of all surviving texts and is constantly updated. The older texts are covered word for word, the later ones mostly with a selection of…
The dictionary of the Tibetan written language has been published at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2005. Its particular scientific significance is that it illustrates the development of the Tibetan vocabulary from a historical perspective. In this reference dictionary, original texts are systematically cited for the first time and translated into German. Representative…
Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) is one of the most important authors of German in the era of two-state identity. His novels tell of German history in a context far beyond Germany. With his essays and articles, Johnson developed the position of a “public intellectual”. His highly literary correspondence is on an equal footing with the literary work, commenting critically on post-war history in an…