A deeper picture of written artefacts
Handwriting is an enormously important cultural practice, a means for people to communicate and pass on knowledge and experience. The Understanding Written Artefacts (UWA) cluster brings together a broad community of researchers to analyse a variety of written artefacts, from 5,000 years ago right up to the present day. We spoke to some members of the cluster about their research.
The oldest surviving written artefacts in the world are thought to be Mesopotamian clay tablets dating from around 5,000 years ago, while handwriting is still being practiced today in a wide variety of forms. The team behind the Understanding Written Artefacts (UWA) research cluster, based at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at the University of Hamburg in Germany, are studying a diverse range of written artefacts from cultures across the world. The cluster brings together researchers from more than 40 disciplines, who are currently working on around 60 different projects. “We are looking at any practice where human societies wrote on objects. Our premise is always that we start from the material object, not the text,” outlines Professor Konrad Hirschler, Director of the UWA cluster. “This could be a cuneiform tablet, a parchment scroll, a WW1 letter or modern-day graffiti for example.”
The cluster’s distinctive feature is that it brings together humanities scholars alongside researchers in natural sciences and computer science, who have developed a number of innovative techniques to analyse written artefacts. The artefact laboratory at CSMC provides both stationary and mobile facilities designed to help researchers build a fuller picture of these objects and enrich our understanding of the past. There are three components of the artefact lab, one of which is a mobile lab, providing equipment which can be transported to the locations where written artefacts are held, so avoiding the need to transport them and expose them to undue risk. “We can go into museums and analyse the objects there, as museums will not always send them to an outside institution,” continues Professor Hirschler. “Members of the cluster have conducted research at the Louvre in Paris for example, and we have also been to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara recently.”
The high-performance lab at CSMC meanwhile is equipped with state-of-theart technology to analyse those artefacts that can be transported. For example Graz University Library recently sent an Egyptian papyrus known as the ‘Mummy Book’: arguably, this papyrus is a fragment of a codex dating from the 3 rd century BCE, around 300-400 years before book binding
whether the papyrus was actually part of a bound codex.
A third component of the artefact lab is a container lab, which is currently stationed in Puducherry, India, for analysis of palmleaf manuscripts, one of the most important writing supports in East and South-East Asia. This laboratory is fully equipped to conduct biochemical and DNA analysis of
“Our researchers have been working with handwritten artefacts for over a decade, and they
develop cuttingedge methods, such as image inpainting employing deep learning , to make writing visible.”
was believed to have been established.
This exciting manuscript was analysed in great depth in Hamburg in August 2024.
“We have conducted full research on the ‘Mummy Book’ across our methodological toolkit,” outlines Professor Hirschler. The researchers are currently analysing the data, which they hope will shed light on
historical palm-leaf manuscripts, which Professor Hirschler says can lead to fresh insights into their provenance. “We are able to gain entirely new information on the biography of these manuscripts, which are currently de-contextualised. Our approach adds a whole range of new data to scholarly discussions,” he continues.
Making the invisible visible
A variety of other techniques have also been developed within the cluster to uncover writing that was previously hidden or invisible.
A prime example is the ENCI (Extracting Non-destructively Cuneiform Inscriptions)
CT-scanner, which allows researchers to read cuneiform tablets enclosed in clay envelopes.
Other projects in the cluster employ imaging technologies and AI, for instance to make palimpsests - manuscripts on which later writing has been superimposed - readable. “Our researchers have been working with handwritten artefacts for over a decade, and they develop cutting-edge methods, such as image inpainting employing deep learning, to make writing visible,” says Professor Hirschler. Among the methods used, the cluster has built up a global reputation for multi-spectral imaging, which involves emitting light at different wavelengths.
“The idea is that the reflections will differ depending on whether there are still traces of ink at that particular point on the object,” explains Dr Jakob Hinze, the cluster’s communications coordinator. This can enable researchers to essentially reconstruct faded or erased texts on several different writing supports.
Many scholars within the cluster are also interested in the overall context and evidence of the practices that were applied on a material object. Each individual written artefact has its own history and is worthy of attention, believes Professor Hirschler.
“A new artefact produced 800 years after the original is not simply a ‘copy’ to us, it’s a new original. It’s a new engagement with this specific content. It’s been put into a new form, layout and material shape,” he stresses. What might previously have been called a copyist has in fact a fair degree of authorial agency in actively reframing texts, which has not always been reflected in the way researchers have dealt with such artefacts. “In the 19 th century critical editions of certain texts were printed, which were presented as the authoritative text, but this is not how humans have historically engaged with information management,” says Professor Hirschler. “It’s a very short blip, because in the digital era we are once again moving to a much more flexible way of dealing with texts.”
Ethical responsibility
The primary goal in this research project is to investigate manuscript cultures, yet at the same time Professor Hirschler and his colleagues are also keenly aware of their ethical responsibility in dealing with the objects themselves, and the need to preserve them for future generations. Where manuscripts have been found to be in a fragile state,
Yao religious scroll on paper. It shows the Fam Ts’ing ‘the three pure ones’, which represent the celestial. The scroll is hung vertically and has ritual functions.
researchers have focused on preserving and stabilising them before engaging in research activities. “We aim to bring manuscripts in
a problematic state of conservation onto a level where we are confident that they will survive and that further research can be conducted on them in future,” says Professor Hirschler. By focusing on the material objects, researchers have learned about how they can be preserved, knowledge that they are developing with institutions in different parts of the world. “We are working internationally with numerous institutions, including in West Africa and East Asia,” says Dr Hinze. An increasing number of humanities projects are now coming to Hamburg to use the facilities and add a material dimension to their work, which provides strong foundations for continued research. With ongoing development of the facilities, also in collaboration with the team at the DESY synchrotron in Hamburg, Professor Hirschler hopes to build on the cluster’s reputation as a centre of excellence in manuscript research. “We do a lot of methodological development work with the team at DESY, essentially developing different methods to analyse written artefacts,” he says. These methods and facilities can help museums, archives and other institutions build a deeper picture of the cultural artefacts that they hold. “By working together with DESY, we have a real chance to build up a sustainable methodology on how to use synchrotron radiation to analyse cultural heritage artefacts,” he says.
3D reconstruction of the ancient theatre of Miletus and its inscriptions.
UWA studies both ancient and modern graffiti. This is a work by graffiti artist Mirko Reisser alias DAIM, who was an Artist in Residence at the cluster.
UWA researchers studying a manuscript at the National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts (NLPCPM) in Raqqada, Kairouan, Tunisia.
Dr Hussein Mohamed is head of the Visual Manuscript Analysis lab and a Principal Investigator in the UWA cluster at the University of Hamburg. We spoke to him about his work in the cluster and how computational document analysis can uncover new details about written artefacts.
EU Researcher: What is your role within the UWA cluster?
Dr Hussein Mohamed: My colleagues and I are utilising and further developing AI approaches to the visual analysis of written artefacts as a whole, beyond their textual content. Our work has three strands. First, we analyse handwriting in terms of style, the ink used, writing tool, and writing support. Second, we detect, cluster, and classify particular visual features of written artefacts, which makes it possible to navigate through large collections. Third, we recover lost visual information in ancient manuscripts that were damaged or overwritten. An example for this is palimpsests. We utilise generative AI techniques such as image inpainting to reconstruct texts that cannot be read anymore, not even with the help of modern imaging techniques such as multispectral imaging.
EUR: How do you approach improving these methods? What role does feedback from the scholars play?
HM: Novel methods in computer vision can help scholars in the humanities to address some of the challenges in manuscript research. For our collaborations to be fruitful, however, both sides need to invest time: As a computer scientist, I first need to understand the details of the research questions that my colleagues in the humanities are engaging with; likewise, the scholars need to invest time to get to grips with the applied approaches I can offer them, and the results that these approaches can generate. In short, to improve a given method in such a way that it helps scholars
in the humanities with their specific research question, I need to thoroughly understand the research question itself, and I need feedback from the scholar who eventually wants to work with the results generated by this method.
EUR: What are you currently working on in the cluster?
HM: I am currently researching advanced mechanisms for the visual navigation of large manuscript collections. Some collections are too complex to be analysed by a single modality, i.e. the way in which information about an artefact is represented, for example in a text or an image. In this research, known as visionlanguage learning, we extract features from both textual and visual modalities and learn the associations between them. For example, visually rich images cannot be fully analysed by the mere detection of a seal or a drawing. We also need information on other aspects such as the spatial relations between different visual elements and their semantic context. To get a holistic understanding of a given written artefact, we need to integrate all the information that we can extract.
EUR: Do you ultimately aim to help scholars spend more time working with the manuscripts rather than sifting through data?
HM: By developing new methods, we can indeed help scholars save time on repetitive tasks, giving them more time for the intellectually exciting aspects of their research. However, the value of our methods is not limited to automation. By combining large amounts of documented knowledge, approaches from our research in computer vision can yield genuine new insights that would otherwise be unattainable, such as finding statistical correlations between different patterns or recovering damaged texts.
Manuscript 2058/6a from the Georgian manuscript collection of Graz University Library is being prepared in the UWA laboratory for X-ray fluorescence scanning (XRF) to determine its provenance through the composition of the black and red inks used.
Jost Gippert is Senior Professor at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg. Together with a team of researchers at CSMC, Professor Gippert is investigating the development of literacy in the Caucasian territories, building on analyses of palimpsests.
EU Researcher: What are palimpsests?
Professor Jost Gippert: Palimpsests are manuscripts usually written on parchment, the contents of which subsequently became obsolete. However, people decided not to throw them away when they were obsolete, as parchment was very expensive in the Middle Ages. Rather they simply erased the contents and used the parchment again for something else. For example we have palimpsests from the 7th century, which were read for maybe 200-300 years. Then they were erased and overwritten in the 11th century with something totally different.
EUR: What is the scope of your research in the Caucasus? What is the timeline of the materials you’re looking at?
JG: There have been two written languages in the Caucasus since the 5th century, Armenian and Georgian. A third – Caucasian/Albanian –was only written for 200-300 years, between around the 5-8th centuries, then given up. There is a successor that still exists today, a language spoken by a small number of people in the Caucasus called Udi. Literacy in the region dates from around the 5th century when it was Christianised. The manuscripts we have from that time are nearly all palimpsests, as practically none survived without being erased later on.
Our timeframe is from the 5th to about the 10 th-11th centuries. We are trying to figure out what they were writing by deciphering the erased text on the palimpsests. Most of the texts are bible translations, along with translations of other theological texts.
EUR: Did the languages co-exist alongside each other? Or were there times when one language was dominant?
JG: It went in waves. Armenian was dominant initially, then Georgian developed its own individual stamp a bit later. Then we had a very important historical fact, namely a schism of the churches at the beginning of the 7th century, when the Armenian Church
departed from the main Greek orthodox tradition, but the Georgians remained. This was a major split, and then they came closer and moved further apart at different times.
EUR: Are you looking at how languages evolve? How do you approach your work on cross-language synthesis?
JG: When we consider the traditions of the early centuries of literacy, we can see that everything was joined together to a certain degree, which is what we mean by synthesis. We put together the information we have on the one language with information that we have on the other, and we try to figure out the extent to which they were influencing each other.
XRF analysis of a Burmese Buddhist ordination manuscript.
An English contract concerning the ‘mortgage of a dwelling house and premises in Scarborough’, dated 10 May 1824.
Using a dataset of synthetic MSI images and a generative deep learning approach, researchers at UWA can reconstruct the hidden undertexts on Georgian Palimpsests.
Cécile Michel is a Professor of Assyriology at the National Center for Scientific Research in Nanterre, France, and a member of the UWA cluster, where she leads a project dedicated to reading cuneiform tablets hidden in their original clay envelopes using ENCI, a high-resolution mobile CT scanner. We spoke to her about what wider insights can be drawn from this work.
EU Researcher: Could you describe the cuneiform tablets?
Professor Cécile Michel: Cuneiform tablets are the first form of writing invented in human history, dating from 3,400 BCE up to 100 CE. It’s a script which was used in three different writing systems – the first system has one sign for one word or idea, the second had one sign per syllable, and the third is an alphabet made up of cuneiform signs. This script has been used by something like 15 different languages from different families across a very large area, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, to the Black Sea, to Egypt. am working on private archives of these tablets from the 19 th century BC excavated in central Anatolia at a site called Kültepe –the ancient name is Kanesh. There are around 23,000 tablets found at Kültepe, only half of which have been read and published.
EUR: Who wrote on the tablets? What type of material are you uncovering?
CM: We find many letters written by merchants, as they travelled a lot, and we also have a lot of letters sent by their wives. They would often write about economic issues, but there’s also a lot about day-to-day details and family relations. Literacy was quite widespread in the Assyrian population, although at different levels. We find tablets from skilled scribes, who write very nicely in very clean, straight lines. We also find tablets written by learners, who make clear grammatical errors.
EUR: How do you use the ENCI in your research?
CM: If, for example, a letter could not be delivered, it often remained in its clay envelope and was never read. Today, we must not destroy these envelopes because they are cultural artefacts in their own right. Nevertheless, we want to read the hidden texts. ENCI enables us to do so. We simply put a tablet into ENCI, and it generates images in slices of 15 microns, that are later reconstructed into a full object. So we can see all the details in very high definition: Not only can we read the hidden text, we can also see how the clay was prepared and shaped into a tablet. We sometimes find inclusions like
stones, snails, shells, seeds, and leaves, which give us hints about the natural environment.
EUR: How far advanced is your research? Are you also working to develop new tools and instruments to analyse cuneiform tablets in greater depth?
CM: I’m developing new ideas to better understand the cuneiform tablets in a holistic sense, so not only the text, but the object as a whole. For example, new techniques can enable us to identify the clays and be more precise about the origins of the letters. Sometimes there are fingerprints on a text which can be analysed, from which we can learn more about the age and gender of the scribes.
Professor Christian schroer is head of the high performance laboratory of the UWA cluster and DESY’s synchrotron radiation source PETRA III in Hamburg, home to sophisticated equipment that can be used to analyse written artefacts, while he also develops mobile tools and methods like the X-ray tomograph ENCI as part of his work in the UWA cluster. We spoke to him about how synchrotron radiation can help researchers look deeper into written artefacts.
EU Researcher: Could you tell us about your role in the cluster?
Professor Christian schroer: I am co-director of UWA and part of the team representing the natural sciences in the cluster. We have a lot of analytical tools at the lab to investigate the chemistry, physics, structure and other aspects of material objects, which is what makes synchrotron radiation interesting. However, objects need to be taken to the lab for analysis, and many archives and museums won’t allow that, so we needed to develop mobile instruments, as well. It was clear to me that we could use tomography to look inside written artefacts like cuneiform tablets in a non-destructive way, and do it on site, which led to the development of ENCI.
EUR: How does ENCI work?
Cs: The X-rays are produced by an ordinary X-ray tube, but the point where they are generated is really small. We can essentially focus the electrons onto a thin tungsten foil in which the X-rays are generated in a really small spot. There is then a very well-defined line through your object, between the source and the detector, which gives you a really sharp projection. We can then see details of the
handwriting, as we have a resolution of basically half the width of a hair.
EUR: And ENCI is mobile?
Cs: Yes, it weighs slightly more than 400 kgs, and can be disassembled into eight pieces, the heaviest of which weighs 100 kgs. By comparison, a typical micro-CT system usually weighs between 2-7 tonnes. ENCI needs a lot of penetrative power to shine through bricks, but at the same time we need to maintain safety standards. We use tungsten to essentially contain the X-rays, but we use as little as possible to keep the weight down.
EUR: Are you looking to improve ENCI and develop new tools?
Cs: Yes, as many people within the cluster are now more aware of how tomography can be used to investigate written artefacts, and are interested in using these methods. We can look into changing the dimensions of the chamber to accommodate larger objects, while books might be more easily penetrated by X-rays, so we can also change certain parameters. see my role as bringing these X-ray techniques that we use in the lab to the cluster, and making them applicable to the analysis of written artefacts.
U NDERsTANDING WRITTEN ARTEfACTs
Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures
Project Objectives
The Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ (UWA) is a cross-disciplinary and international research project for the holistic study of handwritten artefacts. Its main objective is to investigate the rich diversity of global manuscript cultures beyond traditionally held boundaries of academic discipline, time, and space. Its global perspective encompasses all objects carrying handwriting, from the beginning of writing to today’s digital age.
Project funding
The Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures’ (project no. 390893796) is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy.
Project Partners
• Helmut-Schmidt-Universität / Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg (Helmut Schmidt University/ University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg)
• Technische Universität Hamburg (Hamburg University of Technology)
• Deutsches Elektronensynchrotron (DESY, German Electron Synchrotron)
Contact Details
University of Hamburg
Cluster of Excellence
‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ Warburgstraße 26 20354 Hamburg, Germany
T: +0049-(0)40-42838-7127
E: manuscript-cultures@uni-hamburg.de
W: https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/
Enclosed cuneiform clay tablets from the collection of the Louvre Museum.
An enclosed cuneiform tablet inside the radiation chamber of ENCI.
Konrad Hirschler is Professor for Islamic Studies at the University of Hamburg and spokesperson of the Cluster of Excellence UWA.
Konrad Hirschler
A Tibetan written artefact is being analysed at the radiation source PETRA III at DESY.