Monday, 12 June 2023, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

The analysis of rock-based written artefacts, the most secure and widespread medium for transmitting knowledge through time, should not solely be confined to the message of the engraved text but also expand on the mineral-phase composition of the carrier. Equally important information about peculiar characteristics of societies, such as the production processes of inscriptions, and the evolution of inscribed objects through time, in terms of local climate and pollutant factors that have affected them, can be obtained by studying colour remnants and weathering-related products on the surface of engravings. Since sampling is mostly prohibitive in Cultural Heritage, non-destructive and non-invasive analytical methods operating in reflection mode that are sensitive to both chemistry and structure are of great importance for the unambiguous characterization of mineral-based pigments and weathering-related products. Thus, on-field measurements on cultural-heritage objects with evident traces of colour and weathering marks from Miletus, one of the most prominent cities of the Mediterranean in Antiquity, were performed by the portable near-infrared (NIR) and diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier-transform (DRIFT) spectrometers of the mobile lab of CSMC with the assistance of Dr. Sebastian Bosch. Here we will discuss (i) whether the same pigments have been applied for the colouring of different objects of the daily life in Miletus, e.g. inscriptions concerning epigraphic stele, daily life ceramics, construction constituents, and frescoes, and (ii) how weathering processes affected these cultural-heritage objects in time.

Christof Berns is Professor of Classical Archaeology at Universität Hamburg, Department of Cultural Studies (Fachbereich Kulturwissenschaften, Universität Hamburg). He studied Classical Archaeology, Ancient History and Art History at the University of Cologne, where he received his PhD in 1996. His main research interests are urban archaeological research and the culture of Roman Anatolia. During the last 25 years, Christof has coordinated or consulted on numerous projects related to archaeological topics from the Mediterranean region and has published more than 70 articles and catalogue entries about architecture and city history, the Romanization of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as about Hellenistic and Roman sculpture. He is a member and principal investigator of the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts” at the University of Hamburg since 2019 and, on behalf of the Turkish Ministry of Tourism and Cultural Heritage, the director of the excavation site in Miletus since 2017. He is also a member of the board of the German Archaeological Institute.

Stelios Aspiotis is a Research Associate at CSMC and is affiliated with MPI (Mineralogical-Petrographical Institute) at the Universität Hamburg, Department of Earth System Sciences. He studied Geology and Geoenvironment at NKUA (National Kapodistrian University of Athens) and graduated with a M.Sc. degree in Mineralogy and Petrology from the University of Hamburg in 2019. Stelios received his PhD degree in Earth System Sciences at the same university in 2023. His current research activities include applied Mineralogy to Cultural Heritage, spectroscopic analyses of minerals, and the development of methodological approaches for the non-destructive crystallochemical characterization of layered silicates. Stelios is a member and principal investigator (project RFA19: 'Painting the Ancient World: crystallochemical characterization of pigments and minerals in ancient written artefacts') of the Cluster of Excellence 'Understanding Written Artefacts' since 2019 and 2023, respectively, and is the author of almost 10 peer-reviewed publications and conference papers.

Monday, 19 June 2023, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

At the end of the 18th century the Ottoman governor of the province of Sidon, Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār (d. 1804), founded in Acre a splendid endowment complex, including a vast library encompassing over 1,800 volumes, among them masterpieces such as the oldest copy of al-Nadīm’s (d. 995) bibliographic al-Fihrist. Manuscripts bearing the stamp of al-Jazzār’s library, its endowment statements and shorter endowment annotations, or mottos, have been known for a long time to sit in libraries around the world including Chester Beatty, Princeton and Berlin. Yet, the discovery of the library inventory in the Ankara Endowment Ministry has finally provided the decisive clue to study one of the most important cultural projects of its period in the Ottoman provinces.

Our paper aims to uncover the history of this library: how it was formed, kept and dispersed after the death of its founder. We observed that several hands penned the endowment statements and mottos and that two seals matrices were employed, suggesting that multiple writers and curators were active in annotating the books, perhaps depending on the entry time of the volumes in the library, or based on periodic checking of the collection’s contents. For this reason, we analysed and compared the inks employed in the seals, the endowment statements and the mottos of seven al-Jazzār’s manuscripts, nowadays preserved at the Chester Beatty Library, to verify whether groups of writings sharing the same material features can be identified. The study was conducted according to the standard protocol for the characterisation of writing materials in use at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), including analytical methods such as UV-Vis-IR microscopy, shortwave Infrared reflectography (IRR) and X-Ray fluorescence (XRF).

Claudia Colini is a postdoctoral researcher in Archaeometry and a book conservator specialised in Islamic manuscripts and their materials. In 2018 she completed her doctorate at CSMC, with a thesis entitled: 'From recipes to material analysis: the Arabic tradition of black inks and paper coatings (9th to 20th century)'. She joined the Cluster in 2019 as the principal investigator of the research project 'The Scribe’s Choice: Writing Supports in Arabic Documents of the Early Islamic Centuries'. She is also the spokesperson of the Research Field 'Selecting Materials'.

Konrad Hirschler is director of the CSMC and Professor of Middle Eastern History at Universität Hamburg. He was previously Professor of Middle Eastern History at SOAS (London) and Freie Universität Berlin. He is author of books such as Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem, A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture, Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands, Medieval Arabic Historiography, Muʾallafat Yūsuf b. Ḥasan Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, as well as co-editor of volumes such as The Damascus Fragments and Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources.

Monday, 26 June 2022, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

The Katharinen project is dedicated to cataloguing 21 and digitizing 52 liturgical and chronical manuscripts dated to the 13th-17th centuries that are inherently connected with medieval Hamburg and Northern Germany. Some of them have been kept since the early days of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg (SUB), then called the Stadtbibliothek or bibliotheca publica. The manuscripts from the Hamburg Stadtkirche St. Katharinen were moved to the SUB in 1923. Many liturgical manuscripts from this corpus were produced or used in Hamburg, while others have so far been only vaguely attributed to Northern Germany. One of the questions plaguing the modern cataloguing effort concerns the provenance of the manuscripts. Here, we added ink characterization as one of the criteria for provenance.

The most popular European medieval ink, iron-gall ink is usually rich in various metals such as copper and zinc. Together with iron, the main metal of the ink, the metallic components of the ink composition produce specific characteristic patterns, so-called fingerprints. We will discuss the possibility of using ink fingerprints as an indication of a specific place or region or sometimes time of production.

We will report our strategy, based on paleographic, codicological and material analysis, used to identify Hamburg as a place of production of one of the manuscripts of unknown provenance.

Ira Rabin is Professor at Universität Hamburg and a senior scientist at the Federal Institute of Material Research and Testing (BAM) in Berlin and CSMC. She studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  Between 1979 and 1983, she worked as a student and later as a staff member of the Conservation Department of the Jewish National and University Library (JNUL), with specialization paper and parchment conservation. In 1983, she returned to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to continue her studies in physical chemistry, particularly in mass spectrometry. In 1987 she moved to Berlin, where she obtained a PhD degree in physical chemistry at the Max-Planck-Society in collaboration with the Free University. Until 2003, she worked in basic research in cluster physics in the Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max-Planck-Society and continued her research on parchment but as a hobby. Since 2003 her main research interest has been dedicated to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Between 2005 and 2007, she worked in Israel as a scientific advisor to the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Jewish National Library. From 2007 to 2010, she coordinated the international Qumran project. Currently besides conducting research dedicated to the Dead Sea Scrolls and history of black writing inks she is working towards including ink composition into description of historical manuscripts.

Katrin Janz-Wenig studied German and Italian studies and Musicology at the universities of Würzburg and Padua. She received her Ph.D. in Medieval German Literature from the University of Würzburg. Her thesis was about the relationships and the influences of medieval Latin sermons to vernacular sermons and treatises in the 14th and 15th centuries. For four years, she also worked as a lecturer and a member of staff at the University of Würzburg. She taught medieval German language and literature.
In 2012 she amplified her experience in cataloguing medieval manuscripts at the Canton Library Vadiana in St. Gall, Switzerland. After this, she worked till the end of 2014 as a scientific assistant at the University and State Library Düsseldorf, where she catalogued medieval manuscripts in a project financed by the German Research Foundation. From January 2015 until July 2020 she has been a member of staff at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Department for Paleography & Codicology at the Institute for Medieval Research in Vienna, where she was responsible for the cataloguing of the medieval manuscripts at the library of the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine at Klosterneuburg. Since August 2020 she is the curator of the manuscript collection at the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky.

Monday, 10 July 2023, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

The main challenge in the examination of a historic paper is its complexity. Papers contain a large number of components of different sorts, from different plant fibres to inorganic crystalline substances used as fillers or proteomics used as glues, modified under both technological and deterioration processes occurring at different stages and times of an artefact’s life cycle, as well as under the influence of various environmental substances. Traditionally we would need to apply a wide range of methods from different disciplines of both sciences and humanities at the same time, and it rarely happens that we get all the answers to our research questions. Based on the X-ray scattering signals information about the local nano-structure of paper we can learn more about the written artefacts. In this lecture we will discuss the recent development of an innovative experimental X-ray scattering based approach and how it can complement current analytical methods of antique paper identification and raw materials.

Agnieszka Helman-Ważny is presently employed by the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, Division 4.5 (Analysis of Artefacts and Cultural Assets) in Berlin. She is also a Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ and Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Book and Media History at the University of Warsaw. Her publications include monographs and articles on the history of the regional production and usage of paper and books in Asia, including The Archaeology of Tibetan Books (Brill, 2014), and The Mustang Archives: Analysis of handwritten documents via the study of papermaking traditions in Nepal (Brepols, 2021, co-authored with Charles Ramble).

Sylvio Haas is presently employed by the Deutsches-Elektronen-Synchrotron - DESY in Hamburg. He is the beamline scientist in charge of the SAXSMAT beamline P62 at PETRA III. This beamline is dedicated to Small- and Wide- Angle X-ray scattering types of experiments. Before he become the beamline responsible person he worked at many other synchrotrons as a beamline scientist such as BESSY-II (Germany) and MaxLab-II (Sweden) and performed X-ray experiments at other synchrotrons ESRF (France), APS (USA), and Spring8 (Japan). His publication includes articles on X-ray method developments like Anomalous X-ray scattering as well as articles on in-situ and operando studies of nanostructure and nano-chemical composition of fuel cells, catalysts, and many more materials.