SMC 11
Manuscripts and Archives
Edited by Alessandro Bausi, Christian Brockmann, Michael Friedrich, Sabine Kienitz
Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing.
Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions.
The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).
FrontmatterI
ContentsVII
PrefaceIX
by the Editors
Prologue: Contemporary Practices of Archiving
How to Distinguish between Manuscripts and Archival Records: A Study in Archival Theory3
by Dietmar Schenk
Archives from Tibet and the Himalayan Borderlands: Notes on Form and Content19
by Charles Ramble
The Ancient World up to Late Antiquity
Constitution, Contents, Filing and Use of Private Archives:
The Case of the Old Assyrian Archives (nineteenth century BCE)43
by Cécile Michel
Archives in Ancient Egypt, 2500–1000 BCE71
by Fredrik Hagen, with a contribution by Daniel Soliman
Archives and Libraries in Greco-Roman Egypt171
by Jean-Luc Fournet
Libraries and Archives in the Former Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE): Arguing for a Distinction201
by Max Jakob Fölster
Setting a Bishopric / Arranging an Archive:
Traces of Archival Activity in the Bishopric of Alexandria and Antioch231
by Alberto Camplani
Documents, Acts and Archival Habits in Early Christian Church Councils: A Case Study273
by Thomas Graumann
The Middle Ages
Weighing in on Evidence: Documents and Literary Manuscripts in Early Medieval Japan297
by Mikael S. Adolphson
Securing and Preserving Written Documents in Byzantium319
by Michael Grünbart
Archival Practices in the Muslim World prior to 1500339
by Jürgen Paul
The Power of the Pen: Cadis and their Archives - From Writings to Registering Proof of a previous Action taken361
by Christian Müller
Indian Copper-Plate Grants: Inscriptions or Documents?387
by Emmanuel Francis
Epilogue: Why and how to compare
Epilogue: Archives and Archiving across Cultures―Towards a Matrix of Analysis421
by Markus Friedrich
List of Contributors446
List of Documents449