Artefact of the Month

Under Roman rule, Palmyra grew from a minor caravan station in the middle of the Syrian Desert to an important trade metropolis. About two thousand inscriptions – both private and public – scattered throughout the ruins of the city, allow the ancients to speak for themselves, mostly in their vernacular language, Aramaic, but also in Greek and, occasionally, Latin. Many Palmyrene inscriptions survived inside the numerous tombs, usually engraved as epitaphs above the funerary portraits. One such funerary relief, carefully carved by local stonemasons seventeen centuries ago, shows two prematurely deceased children. What were their names, and what do the accompanying inscriptions reveal about their lives?

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Kutia nakshi translates from the Kiswahili language to English as ‘to engrave beauty’. An undeniably elegant phrase, it conjures potent mental imagery, depth of meaning, and layers of esoteric qualities. Inscriptions that adorn a late-nineteenth-century wooden door in coastal Kenya represent an important example of this expression in practice as part of one of the most iconic artistic traditions of the region.

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Amulets have a long tradition in many cultures. These objects are handmade and generally small; they are said to have magical powers that bring the wearer protection and good luck. The fragmentary scroll with the shelfmark ВФ-4203 is not itself an amulet; nevertheless, it is an exceptional example of the use of such objects and their distribution across cultural boundaries. What was the purpose of this manuscript and how did it originate?

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It is November of the year 103 CE in the Fayyum oasis in Middle Egypt. An official of the Roman army is checking the documents of a man in his mid-forties. One of these documents, which we can still imagine in this officer’s hands almost two thousand years later, is now kept at the Hamburg State and University Library. The papyrus P.Hamb.graec. 294 is written in an ink with an unexpected colour, but this is just one of the many aspects that make this written artefact so interesting. Why did the scribe select this unusual ink? What was the purpose of this document?

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Writing a large book by hand was still a common practise in the Middle East of the early twentieth century. Particularly in traditional schools, pupils might be required to copy by hand the text that was currently being taught. Many of these manuscripts were probably not preserved, and the question arises as to how one would identify the work of a teenager. A note in an Arabic manuscript now kept at the Göttingen University Library (Cod. Ms. Arab. 552) claims that the book was written by a twelve-year-old. But is this true? And to what extent does it differ from manuscripts written by adults?

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In the heart of Mesopotamia, where the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates skirted the glorious walls of thousand-year-old cities, the fear of illness, of deadly demonic influences, of misfortune and the evil eye, was omnipresent. We find ourselves in the Late Antique period where the favourite means of protection against such evil adversaries was made of ordinary clay and shaped on the potter’s wheel. The vessel under discussion here, IsIAO 5206, can indeed be described as a typical household device: a clay bowl. However, this bowl is different in as much as it is inscribed with ritual spells. But why use a bowl against evil influences? And what do we know about how it was used to protect its owners?

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The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin preserve a curious clay artefact: a pedestaled box whose surfaces are embellished with images of people and short texts in Maya hieroglyphs. Although the provenance of this object remains uncertain, its exceptional form and unusual text attest to an innovative way of writing that was never widely adopted in Classic Maya culture. For what purpose was it made, and what insights does it give us into the development and use of new technologies in this civilization?

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A letter is usually understood as a written message that one person sends to another. The text inscribed into the golden plate with the shelfmark Guge no 000064 at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan certainly looks like a letter a king might have sent to an emperor in bygone times, but is it really one? And why is there hardly any golden plate of this kind left now, even though this writing tradition has a long history?

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In the year 1734, the court chaplain Johann Christian Götze, who was the librarian at the Electoral Library in Dresden, was sent to Vienna and Rome in order to procure a number of precious books and manuscripts for the Elector of Saxony. One of the hundreds of manuscripts and books he brought back to Dresden was a ‘priceless Mexican book written in hieroglyphs’. Götze’s own estimation of his acquisition is expressed as follows: ‘Our Royal Library secured the privilege of possessing such a rare treasure, ahead of many others.’ He was evidently very aware that the document he had acquired for his library – a document which originated in the pre-Hispanic manuscript culture – was extremely valuable.

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The idea that letters can travel great distances is as true today as it was in antiquity. Indeed, the correspondence between sovereigns knew almost no limits. In the fourteenth century BCE the rulers of the ancient Near East communicated with each other in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the time, written on clay tablets in cuneiform writing. The present document – EA 23 (BM 29793) – offers an interesting insight into the diplomatic exchange between two rulers, announcing the journey of a divine statue from the mountain region of Northern Mesopotamia to the capital city of Thebes in Upper Egypt. Strangely, however, the clay tablet was found at the ancient site of Tell el-Amarna, hundreds of kilometres to the north. Why was the letter discovered so far away from its original destination?

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At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Marie Geffers, a farmer’s wife from Süpplingenburg in present-day Lower Saxony, wrote a letter for her son-in-law, Richard Schulze. This letter was certainly not a normal letter. The hand-written text was meant to give her daughter’s husband magical protection against any of the dangers which might confront him as a soldier. What kind of mysterious text was this? What kind of role did the act of writing play here? And what did Christ have to do with all this?

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It is Constantinople in about the year 1450. The physician Demetrius Angelus has just bound a small manuscript containing philosophical treatises. Before placing it on his bookshelf, he casts a glance at one of the last folios. His eyes are drawn to a note jotted down by a previous owner of that part of the book. Demetrius spends some time pondering over the note and the person who wrote it. Finally, he puts the volume in the bookcase, evidently unaware of the fact that centuries later scholars would refer to this volume as Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, Auctarium T.4.23. As with many of his manuscripts, Demetrius acquired the last part of the Auctarium second hand. Several layers of annotations in different scripts testify to an intense use of that section for over a century. Peeling away those layers, we can gather revealing insights into both the biography of the manuscript and its many Byzantine readers.

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Comprehensive, correct, word-for-word – that was the standard expected of parliamentary transcripts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In effect, these published reports were the official, legally binding records which gave the public the possibility of keeping itself informed about parliamentary debates. But how was it possible to fulfil such high demands before the invention of the tape recorder? The answer is: stenography or shorthand. Quite simply, shorthand is a writing system which, using abbreviations, allows the spoken word to be written with remarkable speed. The manuscript under discussion – parliamentary shorthand notes from the early twentieth century – reveals the additional strategies and tricks which were needed to do justice to the exigencies of stenography.

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A hanging scroll depicting a small town in an idyllic landscape of lakes and gently rolling hills – it seems to be nothing more than a charming, albeit somewhat bland, Chinese painting. Yet, it tells a story of disaster and loss, of the burning of a library, and the looting and destruction of an art collection. Twelve signed inscriptions and numerous seals on the painting tell a tale of shared grief, of loyalty and friendship, and, finally, of appreciation and commemoration.

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A red leather-bound book belonging in the CSMC library is somewhat scuffed and has shallow cracks. The book – with a horizontal format – is a bit smaller than a DIN A5 sheet of paper and, on the spine, written in gold, is the title ‘Andenken guter Freunde’ (‘Remembering Good Friends’). On the front cover, also in gold, are the letters ‘C. D. V.’; on the back cover we find the year ‘1782’. The dog-eared lower outer corners of some of the pages as well as slight damage to the gilt edges suggest that the book was frequently picked up and regularly leafed through. Who used the book? And to what purpose? And what does the information on the binding tell us?

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In October 1728 a fire broke out in Copenhagen, destroying much of the city, including the University Library. At the last moment Professor Árni Magnússon succeeded in having his invaluable personal manuscript collection brought to safety. Among the manuscripts was one that did not originally belong in the collection and to this day it is not clear how it got there. The manuscript itself is just as mysterious, for it has the form of a medieval codex, but the text is written entirely in runes. Why were such different writing traditions combined in one written artefact?

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At some time in the first half of the nineteenth century, a person by the name of Tang Tingguang 唐廷光 roamed the streets of Canton, Southern China. Travelers, soldiers, monks, and beggars walked the wide avenues and narrow alleys lined with the shops and market-stalls that offered anything from books and writing brushes, to fine silk fabrics, delicate sweets, or rice and tea. Tang, however, had something different in mind. He had noted that the owner of the Sangsheng sweet shop was handing out pills to customers for the treatment of bruises. They seemed to be wondrously effective. Tang sent his disciple Li Binghe 李秉和 to obtain a copy of the recipe, hoping that he would finally be able to add it to his recipe book. But would he be successful?

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Anyone who has seen medieval charters in a museum probably remembers them being as large as a poster, full of fancy and artistic writing, and adorned with many seals. That is how the great charters of the high Middle Ages looked – issued by emperors, popes, and powerful city states. How very different is the charter in the archive of Gent, shelf-mark K99, Nr. 174. This document is small and quite unexceptional, and yet it guarantees the legal status of a whole family for generations.

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On 4 December 1207, a scribe in a provincial city in Egypt drew up a document recording the financial arrangements of a marriage. Following the legal rules and regulations of the time, he produced a lengthy Arabic text, and the agreement was accepted by witnesses. The couple were now husband and wife. Over the next fifteen years, however, the manuscript gained further texts, vestiges of a peculiar story of an injustice perpetrated by a father against his daughter.

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In the middle of a night around 2400 years ago, an unknown Athenian sneaked into a cemetery carrying some very odd objects: a small lead coffin with a crooked doll inside it, both bearing inscriptions. He or she headed to a grave, furtively opened its roof and laid those objects as close as possible to the buried corpse while whispering some forbidden formulas. For more than two thousand years, the grave kept its secret, concealing the artefacts until they were discovered by archaeologists in the twentieth century. What kind of secret ritual had been performed?

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In a church, murmuring prayers in Latin, a priest slowly dips a metre-long candle three times into a font filled with fresh water, then reaches for a precious-looking vial and carefully pours a small amount of oil into the water. In the Middle Ages this mysterious ritual of consecrating the baptismal water was repeated once a year, during the Easter Vigil. A large number of baptismal fonts from the Middle Ages are still to be found in churches, and many of them show reliefs with intricate inscriptions. Some of these texts, especially in northern Germany, describe the baptismal fonts – often made of bronze – as a ‘living fountain’. Is this a plausible way of defining a bronze vessel whose contents are changed only once a year?

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Every king strives for fame and immortality in one way or another. Like the generations before and after him, Naram-Suen, the ruler of the Agade dynasty (2254–2218 bce), initiated numerous building projects and had several temples built or renovated throughout southern Mesopotamia. Traditionally, the names of the builders were recorded by hand in commemorative inscriptions on various building elements. However, Naram-Suen's many building projects required such a quantity of inscribed bricks that a new method was developed in order to inscribe as many bricks as possible in as short a time as possible.

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Libraries do not preserve themselves; books – even ancient manuscripts – do not have intrinsic value, only the value people assign to them. In 1699 and 1700, the Welsh philologist and naturalist Edward Lhuyd toured Ireland. Lhuyd had a keen scholarly interest in the Celtic languages and he acquired many manuscripts in the Irish language. He himself did not have much Irish, so he was probably unaware that he was rescuing a small treasury of traditional Irish ‘bardic’ poetry – a rather plain and unattractive manuscript now known as the ‘Seifín Duanaire’. The manuscript is named after a mysterious poet whose work is preserved in that codex, and it is the single most important source extant for a whole species of versification about which we would otherwise know very little.

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As a result of false allegations against the Jews, in which the existence of a Hussite-Jewish conspiracy was claimed, and various anti-Christian crimes were fabricated, Jews were expelled from Vienna and its environs in 1421 – an event that became known as the Vienna Gezerah (edict). In the wake of the expulsions, various Jewish possessions were confiscated by Duke Albrecht V, including numerous Jewish manuscripts. About a month later, the University of Vienna commissioned its theologians to acquire Hebrew books from the duke, books that could be useful for the university and the theological faculty. Under these circumstances, the theologians obtained an old Hebrew codex that contained the second and the third parts of the Old Testament, i.e. the Prophets and the Hagiographa (Fig. 1). However, the Vienna Gezerah, was not the first persecution of Jews this manuscript had faced; the manuscript had witnessed two earlier pogroms, each of them echoed on its pages.

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As in many other pre-modern civilisations, inscriptions in ancient China did not generally contain any sentential or phrasal punctuation. This was in stark contrast to manuscripts of the same period which often display a variety of punctuation practices. However, an ancient bronze scoop measure unearthed in 1982 in Liquan County, Shaanxi Province, China, bears a short but thoroughly punctuated inscription on its underside. Who made the unusual decision to punctuate this inscription, and why?

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Jane Austen’s manuscript of The Watsons presents something of a mystery. As a working manuscript, it looks different from print. With crossings out and revisions exposed, it requires us to consider how meaning is made. Manuscripts like The Watsons, we sense, are touched by life – quite literally, since they bear the impress of the writer’s hand. Jane Austen’s quirks of spelling, how she formed her letters and how she filled her page are all clues to how she worked and therefore to who she was.

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The opening night of William Shakespeare’s Othello in Hamburg – 26 November 1776 – ended in a scandal. Even while the play was still going on, many outraged members of the packed audience left the theatre. The increasingly intense scenes of jealousy and dire intrigue – reportedly – caused any number of ladies in the audience to faint, and some even had miscarriages following their visit to the theatre. The second performance of the play was very poorly attended and this led theatre director Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, who played the diabolical Iago on stage, to revise the play – both quickly and extensively. The prompt book, which has been preserved to this day, bears testimony to this attempt to rescue a failing theatre production.

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The Journey to the West can be counted among the most popular narratives in the world. One of its most widely referenced versions is the Chinese novel Xiyou ji, written towards the end of the sixteenth century. Over the course of its one hundred chapters, this novel tells the story of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, who protects the Buddhist monk Tripitaka during his odyssey from China to the Western Heaven in search of the real Buddhist scriptures. Tripitaka is modelled after Xuanzang (c. 602–664), probably the most famous among the Chinese monks travelling to India ‘in search of the dharma’. The Journey owes its popularity in large part to its innumerable versions, which span varied times, cultures, and forms of media. We recently discovered, in the Deep Rooted Tree Museum (Ppuri Kip’ǔn Namu Pangmulgwan) in Sunch’ǒn in Southwest Korea, a hitherto unnoticed Korean version of The Journey in the form of a manuscript from the late 1920s or early 1930s. Over the course of almost two years, an unknown scribe had copied out a Korean translation of The Journey (Kor.: Sŏyugi) from over 400 newspaper issues and thus in effect produced a multi-volume manuscript. What may have been his motivation?

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At the age of 35, Börne writes to Jeanette Wohl – once again. The two of them have been good friends for many years; amorous sparks are still flying between them, but, so far, their wedding plans are little more than dreams. Börne writes this letter – beginning on 8 December 1821 and finishing on 10 December – having looked forward to her reply for several days in vain; and the most recent delivery is still not the desired reply. This letter is a perfect example of written communication at the start of the nineteenth century, although Börne uses it to air his frustration in a highly individualized way: He punishes Jeanette Wohl with a very unusual style of letter.

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An eighteenth-century Ottoman prayer book in the Ankara Ethnography Museum consists of an extraordinary selection of religious images including seal designs, footprints of the Prophet Muhammad, eschatological compositions, and depictions of the holy quartet of cities: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and Damascus. The signs of use and detailed marginal notes accompanying these devotional images reveal how users sought cure, protection, and intercession from this manuscript. Such internal evidence raises questions: What was special about the content of this prayer book? How did religious imagery function, and in what ways was it deemed efficacious?

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Clay tablets from the Ancient Near East inscribed in cuneiform, the oldest known writing in the world, were – and, indeed, still are – often excavated illicitly and then sold on the black market. Even worse, fragments of tablets were sold to countless international collectors without much hope of the pieces ever being re-assembled again. Consequently, many of the written stories on such tablets – regardless of whether they are myths, letters or witnessed reports – no longer have an ending (or even a beginning, for that matter). The situation is quite different for two particular fragments, however: KUG 15 and AO 29196. Thirty years ago, in the 1980s, a young Assyriologist working in the Louvre realised that the counterpart of the fragment she was working on was not in the Louvre or in Paris, or even in France, but in another country…

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