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…
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 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.…
By means of the present project, an important contribution to Greek philology is realised, and a large step towards filling a current lacuna in the understanding of literature from Classical Antiquity (and thereby the history of education) undertaken.
Large swathes of Greek literature, in particular that of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, are not attested in fully preserved…
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…
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…
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…