Events

The Cuneiform Sign List Proto-Ea: Scribal Exercise or Scholarly Text?

Paul Delnero (Johns Hopkins University)

The study of Mesopotamian scribal education, which has led to a paradigm shift in how Sumerian literary and lexical texts are interpreted, has also resulted in two claims that have had a substantial influence on how these texts are conceptualized. One is that they are exercises produced...

Ephemeral Writing: Exploring Rewritability in Manuscript Cultures

Part One: Clay, Wax, Papyrus, and Ink on ‘Erasable Coatings’  

Naples, 7–9 May 2025

A twin hands-on workshop at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ & University of Hamburg / CSMC

Organised by Michele Cammarosano & Claudia Colini 

Since antiquity, the written word has been justly celebrated for its ability to outlast the...

Collecting Words and Putting Them in Place: Lexicographical Traditions and Their Agendas

Jointly organised by the Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts and the Academy Projects Etymologika, INEL, and Tamilex

The workshop aims at discovering the hidden universals that inform lexicographical writings beyond one specific language or period of time. To achieve this, we will adopt a...

A Woman Doing her Accounts: Some Lessons from a Peripatetic Early-Modern Image

Ray Schrire (Tel Aviv University) and Dror Wahrman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem / Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin)

In 1745, the Swedish princess Louisa Ulrika of Prussia commissioned a pair of paintings from the French artist Jean Siméon Chardin. His response set off an extraordinary chain of reproduction, repurposing...

Multigraphic written artefacts are characterised by their uses of multiple graphical modes to convey information including texts, pictorial elements, diagrams, musical or choreographic notations, maps, tables and all kinds of combinations of those. They form a visual matrix that offers, and often demands, a complex, multi-modal way of engagement. These artefacts are present in most writing...