SMC 42Removed and Rewritten: New SMC Volume on Palimpsests

4 December 2024

Photo: De Gruyter

Recovering hidden texts on palimpsests has been a challenge for manuscript researchers for centuries. While the focus has long been restricted to ancient or medieval parchment manuscripts, the new SMC volume shows how much richer the topic of palimpsests is when viewed from a cross-cultural perspective.

We know the phenomenon from various manuscript cultures: Writing that was considered obsolete was removed from the surface of a written artefact so that it could be written on again. The objects created in this way are generally referred to as palimpsests. Naturally, palimpsests have always aroused the curiosity of researchers: What texts that were once discarded are hidden beneath the upper layer of writing? What information is contained in them? To answer these questions, researchers in past centuries sometimes resorted to drastic measures: They treated the written artefacts with chemicals that made the hidden writing legible again for a short time, but destroyed them completely in the long term. To avoid such irreversible damage, researchers today use imaging techniques developed in the 20th century with which they try to reconstruct the lost writing non-destructively. These methods have been continuously refined and improved in recent years. With the rapid developments in the field of AI applications, researchers today have more options than ever for recovering texts that were thought to be lost forever.

Palimpsests and Related Phenomena across Languages and Cultures, the new volume in the Studies in Manuscript Cultures book series takes a cross-cultural approach to palimpsests. While dealing in detail with the methods available to researchers today for deciphering the writing on palimpsests, the essays edited by Jost Gippert, José Maksimczuk, and Hasmik Sargsyan also, and crucially, contribute to our understanding of the phenomenon of palimpsests in all its complexity and variety. Until now, the prevailing view has been very one-sided and Europe-centred, focusing almost exclusively on parchment manuscripts from antiquity or the Middle Ages. The picture becomes more complex when we broaden our view to include less-explored manuscript cultures. This begins with the material used: If we look, for example, at the Islamic context in West Africa or at Japan, we also find paper palimpsests. And while the overwritten text often bears no relation to the newly applied text, there are also cases in which the layers of a palimpsest interact in different ways.

The example of palimpsests thus vividly illustrates the potential of collaboration beyond the usual disciplinary boundaries: To gain new insights, scholars with philological expertise in the respective manuscript culture as well as natural and computer scientists are needed. In the case of palimpsests, this allows us to address questions that have not been the focus of research so far: What different techniques were used to remove the original writing? How do we understand palimpsests in which we find not two, but several layers of different writing? How did the process of dismantling codices to serve as material for palimpsests work? How can we date the different layers of writing?

In 18 contributions, the current volume provides insights into the full range of these topics. It is the output of two workshops held at the CSMC in October 2021 and July 2023, respectively, during which the participants shared their research on palimpsests from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Like almost all books in the series, the issue is available open access and can be downloaded from the publisher’s website.