SMC 37The Ancient World Revisited

26 February 2024

Photo: De Gruyter

What does the materiality of written artefacts teach us about ancient history? The new volume of 'Studies in Manuscript Cultures' demonstrates the impact of a holistic approach considering materiality and content alike with case studies from the Near East, Egypt, the Mediterranean, China, and India

With the advancement of ever more fine-grained academic disciplines since the 19th century, academic scholarship in the humanities became increasingly nuanced. At the same time, these disciplines created artificial boundaries along linguistic, temporal, and geographical lines, thus hampering the study of cross-cultural phenomena such as writing. Moreover, since traditionally the vast majority of historians and philologists have been exclusively interested in texts, most modern scholarship on written artefacts has been textual scholarship, largely neglecting the material dimension of these artefacts. Only in the past few decades did scholars become invested in ‘material philology’, a view which, in the words of Stephen G. Nichols, who coined the term, ‘sees the manuscript not as a passive record, but as a historical document thrusting itself into history and whose very materiality makes it a (…) cultural drama.’ In most cases, however, material aspects were still regarded as secondary to the text.

The new volume of the Studies in Manuscript Cultures (SMC) book series employs a cross-cultural approach to ancient written artefacts in which the material dimension takes centre stage. Accordingly, it is exemplary of the research agenda of the CSMC and its Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’. In eleven case studies in five sections on the ancient world, including the Near East, Egypt, the Mediterranean, China, and India, the contributors to the volume demonstrate the impact of a holistic approach that considers materiality and content alike.

The Ancient World Revisited: Material Dimensions of Written Artefacts was edited by Marilina Betrò, Michael Friedrich, and Cécile Michel in cooperation with Jesper Eidem and Gianluca Miniaci. Like all previous volumes of SMC, it is available open access. You can download it for free from the publisher’s website.