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…
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…
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…
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 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 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 research project “Kulte im Kult” aims to analyse a specific type of Greek sanctuaries on two levels. These so called extraurban sanctuaries, that are situated outside the ancient cities, normally consist of a main sanctuary and additional smaller cult areas. On the one hand, it is aimed to reconstruct and analyse the sacral structures of these sanctuaries and their functions in the project. On…
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…
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…
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 Buddhist cave complexes in the region of Kucha, located on the northern Silk Road (in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China), house impressive wall paintings dating approximately from the 5th to 10th century. These are now, for the first time, being documented, studied, and made digitally accessible. In a project of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, research…