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…
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 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…
Since 1898 the Law Sources Foundation of the Swiss Lawyers Society edits a collection of law sources which had been created on Swiss territory up to 1798, the Collection of Swiss Law Sources. The Collection contains materials from the early Middle Ages until early modern times (1798). Over 130 volumes, or more than 80'000 pages of source material and comments from all language regions of…
Papyrology, epigraphy, and numismatics frequently enrich our knowledge about the cultures of the old world by means of newly discovered materials. Therefore, the above mentioned professions may be regarded as disciplines conducting fundamental research and thus they provide the groundwork for further historical as well as literary research. The project is devoted to the editing, translation, and…
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 Swiss Text Corpus project is part of an international research project which aims to provide a balanced collection of the standard German language of the 20th century and to make it accessible online by digitising German-language texts of all kinds (newspaper articles, advertising, forms, instructions, guides, popular scientific literature, youth and trivial literature, fiction, etc.). The…
The Swiss Idioticon is an institute for the research and documentation of the German language and its dialects in Switzerland. Its main task is the development of the dictionary of the Swiss-German language (Swiss Idiotikon) in printed and digital form. This work describes Alemannic vocabulary in Switzerland from the late Middle Ages to the 21st century. It is the largest regional dictionary in…
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…
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…
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…
The database documents the Hôtel de Musique's lively theatrical activity from 1766 to 1905, with a repertoire that includes theatre, opera, ballet, concerts and extraordinary events. The inventory provides a lively and colourful picture of Bernese theatre culture in the 19th century.
The project was developed in 2008 as part of a lecture on Bernese theatre history in the Seminar of Swiss Opera…
Max Reger (1873-1916) has left us, both in terms of expansiveness and complexity, with a monumental oeuvre. Apart from operas, his works encompasses all contemporaneous genres – chamber music, piano compositions, choirs, orchestral pieces and choir symphonies. Especially remarkable are, for a designated pioneer of new music, his work with organs as well as his revisions of other composers’ works,…
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…
The meaning of Old Uyghur or Old Turkish is comparable to Latin in the Romanic languages. However, a state-of-the-art dictionary of this language does not yet exist. But since January 1, 2017, a research project under the supervision of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences has begun to create a dictionary of Old-Uigurian /Old-Turkish.
The Turkish people of today’s Uyghurs are not in a position to…