1 November 2021
Photo: CSMC
From 7-8 October 2021, the CSMC hosted the workshop 'Removed and Rewritten: Palimpsests and Related Phenomena from a Cross-Cultural Perspective'. In this contribution, the organisers reflect on what has been achieved – and look ahead to future work in the field.
Due to the restrictions on travelling and in-person meetings caused by the pandemic, the workshop adopted a hybrid format. Seven of the speakers were present in Hamburg, while nine participated online. In addition, more than sixty colleagues from all around the world attended the sessions online. After more than one and a half years of holding workshops exclusively online, such a hybrid event was a novelty and a successful experiment at the CSMC.
Organised by Jost Gippert, José Maksimczuk, and Thies Staack, the workshop featured sixteen leading scholars with expertise in palimpsests and related phenomena from a wide range of manuscript cultures: Greek, Russian, Japanese, Italian, Georgian, Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, Caucasian Albanian, Coptic, and Latin. The talks provided a near-to complete overview of recent advances in research on palimpsests. Discussions were centered on the advantages of new digital technological developments for the recovering of erased writing, and, equally important, on difficulties and current shortcomings of the existing technologies.
Moreover, the workshop included several presentations that challenged some of the traditional views on palimpsests. Although parchment is doubtless the most common writing support for palimpsests, some of the talks addressed examples of paper palimpsests and closely-related phenomena of ‘removing and rewriting’ in bronze or stone inscriptions, thereby extending the scope of the workshop to epigraphy. The speakers not only demonstrated that these very different writing supports required specific ‘palimpsesting’ techniques. It also became clear that the co-presence of two layers of writing, which is often interpreted as an unwanted trace of re-use, was in some cases brought about intentionally.
