Why reuse manuscripts in Late Bronze Age Egypt? An attempt to explain the coexistence of reused and non-reused papyri in Deir el-Medina – On the trail of the neverending manuscript. Comparative perspectives on rewritable media 30-31 May 2023, Naples (original) (raw)
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On the trail of the neverending manuscript. Comparative perspectives on rewritable media
2023
On the trail of the neverending manuscript. Comparative perspectives on rewritable media. International workshop, University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’, 30–31 May, 2023. https://sites.google.com/view/ductulivesuviani/neverending-manuscript/workshop-2023 Who wants to live forever? 🎵Maybe some types of manuscripts do. In many cases, the deliberate destruction of a text has nothing to do with auto da fé, damnatio memoriae or the like, nor does it imply the destruction of manuscripts, but is instead a welcome, ‘green’ option that saves time, space and resources. Schooling, accounting and literary creation are just some of the typical contexts in which this happens: erase and rewrite, erase and rewrite... the ‘ideal’ manuscript, here, is the one that allows us to do it endlessly, and with as little effort as possible. Manuscript cultures have responded to this challenge by inventing clay and wax tablets, rewritable inks, eraser and pencil, and much more, with complex processes of cultural transfer, contamination, and profound implications in terms of memorisation and composition, acquisition of writing, and conceptualisation of mental processes. We will go in search of the ‘infinite manuscript’ by traveling through time and space with the help of a group of specialists in cultures, manuscripts, and materials far and near, and during a hands-on session we will be able to indulge in writing on it and listening to its voice.
Heritage Science, 2021
Over the last few years, the Federal Institute for material research (BAM, Berlin) together with the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC, University of Hamburg) have initiated a systematic material investigation of black inks produced from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (ca. fourth century CE-fourteenth/fifteenth centuries CE), aimed primarily at extending and complementing findings from previous sporadic studies. Part of this systematic investigation has focused on Egyptian Coptic manuscripts, and the present preliminary study is one of its outputs. It centres on a corpus of 45 Coptic manuscripts-43 papyri and 2 ostraca-preserved at the Palau-Ribes and Roca-Puig collections in Barcelona. The manuscripts come from the Monastery of Apa Apollo at Bawit, one of the largest monastic settlements in Egypt between the Late Antiquity and the Early Islamic Period (sixth-eighth centuries CE). The composition of their black inks was investigated in situ using near-infrared reflectography (NIRR) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF). The analyses determined that the manuscripts were written using different types of ink: pure carbon ink; carbon ink containing iron; mixed inks containing carbon, polyphenols and metallic elements; and iron-gall ink. The variety of inks used for the documentary texts seems to reflect the articulate administrative system of the monastery of Bawit. This study reveals that, in contrast to the documents, written mostly with carbon-based inks, literary biblical texts were written with iron-gall ink. The frequent reuse of papyrus paper for certain categories of documents may suggest that carbonbased inks were used for ephemeral manuscripts, since they were easy to erase by abrasion.
“It Is Written”?: Making, remaking and unmaking early ‘writing’ in the lower Nile Valley
In: Piquette, K. E. and Whitehouse, R. D. (eds), Writing as Material Practice: Substance, surface and medium, 213-238. London: Ubiquity Press., 2013
Conventional analysis and interpretation of inscriptions and associated images often focus on their status as finished objects, with less attention being devoted to image ‘life histories’, particularly the creative processes involved in physical expression. The aim of this chapter is to explore the unfolding of written culture across time–space in relation to particular material media and the implications of their transformations for the role of inscribed objects. For its basis, this inquiry grapples with evidence from the lower Nile Valley during the Late Predynastic–Early Dynastic periods (c.3300 / 3100–2800 / 2770 bce), including perforated bone, ivory and wooden plaques or ‘labels’, stone vessels, and funerary stelae from cemetery contexts, with particular focus on the Upper Egyptian site of Abydos. Tool and other marks on these objects provide detailed insight into sequences of technical action involved in the writing process. However, I move beyond a general consideration of the writing act to focus on different degrees of un-making and partial making, as well as episodes of adjustment, addition, and possible re-making. Whole compositions and parts thereof are obliterated through vigorous scratching or scraping away while some are scored or crossed out. Yet other images are tidily removed. Additions may be made after initial inscription using different or similar writing tools and techniques. In at least one case, the drafting phase appears complete while the subsequent carving remains unfinished. Drawing on the notion of chaîne opératoire and practice theory, including structuration, I examine these secondary and other transformations and consider their implications for maker intention and choice, and object function and meaning. In contrast to notions of writing as enduring and transcendent, embodied in terms such as ‘record’ or ‘source’, a material practice approach prompts consideration of the ways in which writing and related symbolic modes may be unstable. Based on the form, content and modes of expression, as well as spatial and temporal distribution, Egypt’s earliest script was clearly bound up with the development of the Egyptian state, playing an important role in high status funerary practice. However, despite the centralisation and increasing standardisation of scribal and artistic activities, the ways in which the writing ‘system’ was practised on more local and individual levels could be variable and contingent.
Document Reuse in Medieval Arabic Manuscripts
Late medieval Arabic societies were highly literate. The central significance of the written word entailed a rich production of narrative and normative texts in which medieval authors made sense of past and present. Such texts, especially chronicles and biographical dictionaries, have come down to us in large numbers and they have held a central position in the writing of medieval Middle Eastern history. 1 The sheer mass of these texts has given the field outstandingly rich quantitative and qualitative data, which are now increasingly exploited by digital text-mining. 2 On account of their central position, these texts have themselves become the subject of historiographical inquiries and there is a sophisticated debate on their meanings, either focusing on individual authors 3 or through consideration of a larger number of texts as a historiographical field. 4 For most of the last century, the study of medieval Middle Eastern history has primarily relied on such narrative and normative sources as the sheer mass of chronicles, treatises, biographical dictionaries and similar texts almost inevitably foregrounded them. By contrast, documentary material such as contracts, petitions, edicts and deeds—the products of pragmatic litera-cy—have played a relatively minor role in the historical practice of scholars of the medieval Middle East compared with fields such as Ottoman history or medieval Latin European history. 5 Within this non-documentary research paradigm, historians formed a rather pessimistic outlook of what was actually researchable; Roy Mottahedeh 6 famously claimed that 'ulamology', the
ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS AND THEIR HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE
Education and Culture Studies, 2022
If ancient documents are exposed to not bacteriological, but mycological erosion, i.e., if the pages are already damaged or have just begun to be damaged by microscopic fungi, then we use the method of chemical restoration-cleaning. For this, the manuscripts are kept in a special chemical liquid for a certain period of time or only damaged parts of the document are washed and dried in a special way with the same substance. But unfortunately, it is impossible to completely destroy the embryos of the fungi that are spread in the books.
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, 2015
With a continuous tradition spanning more than two millennia, funerary texts from ancient Egypt offer an excellent data set for studying how compositions were composed and passed on in the ancient Near East. Clear evidence demonstrates the importance and mechanics of scribal copying in the transmission process. What remain less clear are the methods by which new compositions were created. In some cases, the accretion of scholia, commentary, and exegesis produced new versions of old texts. This is well illustrated by the continuum between Coffin Text (CT) spell 335 and Book of the Dead (BD) spell 17. In other cases, however, large collections appear in writing for the first time showing few hints at the earlier stages of their production. This is true for the Pyramid Texts (PT), whose pre-written forms can only be hypothesized. Fortunately, fragmentary steps from conception to textualization are partially preserved for a relatively little studied corpus from Roman Period Egypt, sometimes known by the title the Demotic Book of Breathing. Despite clearly representing the final stage in the PT-CT-BD tradition, scribes did not create this composition by copying from its predecessors. Instead, a new composition was crafted without direct parallel. In addition, the new text was never fixed, as fifty separate exemplars attest to a core set of formulae that could be added to, subtracted from, or rearranged at will. The variance in this corpus reflects a growing trend toward multiplicity in similar funerary manuscripts from Greco-Roman Egypt. A portion of this variance can be demonstrated to derive from an active oral tradition and it is this oral tradition, I will argue, that provided the raw material for new compositions such as the Demotic Book of Breathing. This paper will therefore address how textual traditions began by looking at the very end of funerary literature in ancient Egypt.
"Archives in Ancient Egypt, 2500-1000 BCE"
A. Bausi, C. Brockmann, M. Friedrich and S. Kienitz (eds.), Manuscripts and Archives (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 11, De Gruyter, 2018), 2018
The article gathers and describes the evidence relating to archives in ancient Egypt in the period c. 2500–1000 BCE, and discusses its importance for our understanding of archival practices and functions. The material, which consists primarily of papyri, ostraca and, in some extraordinary cases, of clay tablets, is invariably fragmentary, widely distributed both chronologically and geographically, and in many cases largely unpublished. The article provides a convenient overview of the contents of the surviving archives with a notable focus on types of documents and their uses, as well as archaeological context and the materiality of manuscripts. Contextual material is only occasionally cited, and the emphasis throughout is on the physical documents as remains of archival holdings.