Gleaming Words: Cultural Interaction in Eurasian Golden Plate Inscriptions

Project Group

The Project Group Gleaming Words investigates the cultural and historical significance of writing on golden plates across Eurasia, tracing their diffusion from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt through the Mediterranean and eastwards to Persia, South, East and Southeast Asia. Easily repurposed and thus rarely preserved within individual cultures, these plates nevertheless testify to transregional encounters and entanglements in elite material choices and conspicuous consumption. The Project Group delves into how evolving cultural perceptions of golden plates, such as numinosity and sumptuousness, shaped material choices across regions and determined their use in ritual and administrative contexts, oscillating between magico-religious and diplomatic practices. The Project Group aims at fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue across Humanities and Natural Sciences, spanning all relevant fields from Archaeometry to Vietnamese Studies, combining historical, philological and scientific analyses while promoting minimally invasive approaches to the study of production, provenance and dating. Planned outcomes include an online lecture series and a collaborative publication mapping the touchstones, modalities and symbolic values in the transmission of these WAs.