Making the invisible visible
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.”
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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 3rd 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.
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 19th 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.”
3D reconstruction of the ancient theatre of Miletus and its inscriptions.
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.
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,
UWA researchers studying a manuscript at the National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts (NLPCPM) in Raqqada, Kairouan, Tunisia.
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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.
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