Gleaming Words: Cultural Interaction in Eurasian Golden Plate Inscriptions

Project Group

Detail of a gold plate commissioned by the Chinese Empress Wu Zetian in 700 CE, 36.2 × 8 cm, 223.5 g, 96% gold purity, inscribed in three columns with 63 characters. Discovered in 1982 at Junji Peak, Mount Song, Henan Province. Collection of the Henan Museum, PRC. Photograph © Ondřej Škrabal

Before the global spread of paper, the material and form of preferred writing supports differed significantly across societies: clay or wax tablets, scrolls made of papyrus, parchment, bamboo slips, bark, stacked folios of palm leaves or wood and many others. While such supports could and did gradually spread across large territories, only rarely do we encounter cases in which the same type of writing support was used across entire continents.

One of the lesser-known cases of such widespread use is the writing on sheets of gold. Its distribution across continents was, however, not entirely synchronic. Although gold was available throughout the world, it was not an obvious or natural choice as a writing support in most cultures. Rather, the idea of writing on gold appears to have travelled across regions, encountering different cultural attitudes towards the material itself and different conceptions of what should be inscribed on it.

The Project Group Gleaming Words traces the diffusion of this exceptional writing support from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt through the Mediterranean world and further eastwards to Persia, South Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia, and investigates the cultural, historical and material significance of writing on plates made of precious metals, especially gold, across Eurasia.

Because gold plates were extremely valuable yet easy to melt down and reuse, they have rarely been preserved in large numbers within individual cultural traditions. Nevertheless, surviving examples and textual references testify to long-distance encounters and shared practices, particularly in the sphere of elite material choices and conspicuous consumption. Gleaming Words delves into how evolving cultural perceptions of gold plates, such as associations with numinosity, permanence and sumptuousness, shaped material choices across regions and determined their use in ritual and administrative contexts, oscillating between magico-religious, political and diplomatic practices. By focusing on these artefacts, the working group develops a test case for studying the history of writing from a transregional and comparative perspective.

Situated within the interdisciplinary framework of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’, the group makes use of the programme’s strong focus on the interaction of regions and disciplines. Writing on precious metal plates provides an ideal field for such an approach, since it lies at the intersection of manuscript studies, epigraphy, archaeology, philology and the natural sciences. Building on achievements from the first funding phase of the Cluster (2019–2025), especially with regard to the visual organisation and the interconnection of manuscript and epigraphic practices, the group investigates how different societies encountered, adopted, adapted and conceptualised the use of metal plates as writing supports. In doing so, it also evaluates the suitability of current methodological frameworks for describing entangled manuscript cultures.

As part of its work, the group examines the practice of inscribing metal plates more broadly, including not only gold but also silver, bronze and copper, which often served as intermediary media in processes of transmission. This broader perspective allows for a better understanding of features such as size, shape, inscription techniques, visual organisation and binding encountered in gold plates. Binding techniques are of particular interest, as they often remained conservative within specific cultural regions and may reveal patterns of cultural contact. Archaeological and textual evidence are evaluated together in order to understand how these artefacts functioned in political, religious and diplomatic contexts and how their symbolic meanings changed over time.

The Project Group Gleaming Words aims to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue between the Humanities and the Natural Sciences, spanning all relevant fields from Archaeometry to Vietnamese Studies, and combining historical, philological and scientific analyses while promoting minimally invasive approaches to the study of production, provenance and dating.