Filtern
Dokumenttyp
- Zeitschriftenartikel (8)
- Vortrag (2)
- Buchkapitel (1)
Sprache
- Englisch (11)
Referierte Publikation
- nein (11)
Schlagworte
- Non-destructive testing (11) (entfernen)
Organisationseinheit der BAM
Eingeladener Vortrag
- nein (2)
Our standard protocol for the characterisation of writing materials within advanced manuscript studies has been successfully used to investigate manuscripts written with a pure ink on a homogeneous writing surface. However, this protocol is inadequate for analysing documents penned in mixed inks. We present here the advantages and limitations of the improved version of the protocol, which now includes imaging further into the infrared region (1100−1700 nm).
The Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project (NGMPP) microfilmed two sets of the rNying margyud 'bum: in 1989 the set stored in the National Archives in Kathmandu (NAK) and in 1992 another set during an expedition to Nubri, Samagaon. Both microfilming were carried out under the local director of the Nepal Research Centre (NRC) in Kathmandu, and who has also discussed the two (and other) rNying ma rgyud 'bum sets on several occasions.2 The NAK and Nubri rNying ma rgyud 'bum sets were extensively studied and catalogued (Almogi) within the framework of the Tibetology sub-project "The Manuscript Collections of supervision of Franz-Karl Ehrhard, who was at the time the the Ancient Tantras (rNying ma rgyud 'bum): An Examination of Variance," conducted at the Researcher Group "Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa," University of Hamburg (2008-2011).
This article presents the findings resulting from the material analysis of several Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscripts from a corpus partly preserved in Nepal, viz. in the National Archives, Kathmandu (NAK), and in the Kaiser Library (KL), which is likewise situated in Kathmandu. The analysis was undertaken in March 2013. The colleagues of the NAK allocated a room in their precincts to us, where we could set up our mobile laboratory, and gave us access to the required manuscripts from their holdings. The officials of the KL, in turn, allowed us to take some of their valuable and ancient manuscripts to the NAK. In this way, we were enabled to conduct multi-instrumental studies on writing materials of great antiquity and interest.
The investigation of physical properties and chemical composition generates data important for answering cultural-historical questions that cannot be solved by historical and philological methods alone. Due to technological developments, technical diagnostics in art and culture are in ever-greater demand in such fields of transdisciplinary research. Natural sciences play auxiliary role in the studies of manuscripts. The success of their contribution depends strongly on the formulation of the question, the choice of the methods to obtain the requested answer, and appropriate reference databases. First, report was given on the measurements performed on local raw materials, such as, plants, minerals and animals, which constitute the reference session. Then, the first results of the scientific analysis of several fragments from the Malian manuscript collections were present.
The international Qumran project coordinated at the BAM, Berlin, resulted in an integrated methodology for determining the original and acquired properties of the skin-based writing surfaces of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This methodology offers a powerful tool for addressing such questions as the provenance, sorting and comparison of manuscripts. In addition, we have developed specific protocols for on-site studies, which were successfully applied to the fragments from the Schøyen collection in Norway. Our studies show that the Dead Sea Scrolls writing surfaces can be divided roughly into three groups: leather, parchments of a light tint, and those of various shades of brown. The latter ones are invariably tanned, whereas the middle group is characterized by the presence of various inorganic salts. Some of the pale parchments, among them the Temple Scroll (11Q19), are remarkably similar to medieval European parchment. Therefore we have formulated the working theory that in the Judaea of the Hellenistic period two different parchment-making traditions existed side by side: an ‘eastern’ one (represented by the tanned parchments of Qumran, closely resembling Aramaic documents from the fifth century BC, and a ‘western’ one (represented by the untanned/lightly tanned ones similar to early Christian Greek parchments).
This division has found support during our first pilot study of the Geniza fragments, in which Babylonian and Palestinian traditions seem to follow the “eastern” and “western” technologies, respectively.
The evolution and socio-geographic distribution of writing inks in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages build the second focus of the BAM group. We use X-ray fluorescence analysis (XRF) to determine the chemical composition of the inks and NIR-reflectography for their typology. Here the early appearance of the metal containing inks clearly belongs to the western tradition as opposed to the continuous use of soot inks in the East.
Material study of inks
(2016)
Our experimental knowledge about the inks of antiquity and late antiquity rarely goes beyond their visual description. In rare cases, inks typology has been determined by means of microscopy and reflectography, i.e. using their physical and optical properties, respectively. Soot, plant, and iron gall inks form different typological classes of historical black writing materials. Soot ink is a fine dispersion of carbon pigments in a water-soluble binding agent; plant-based ink consists of tannin solution; iron gall-ink presents a boundary case between soot and plant ink— a water soluble preliminary stage (similar to inks from the second group) oxidizes and evolves into a black, insoluble material (similar to the carbon pigments of the first group) when the writing is exposed to air. Each ink class has distinct properties that would readily permit their easy differentiation, if only these historical inks always belonged to just one of the classes above. In reality, inks may contain additives that obscure a clear picture.
Even crude observations suggest that the inks of antiquity differed greatly in their composition. We believe, that reconstructing the ink recipes with the help of advanced non-destructive analytical techniques could serve as a powerful accessory in the studies of ancient papyri.
The proposed paper will present a short survey of the methods of material analysis and the challenges offered by ancient inks. (Two) examples of ink studies from the collections of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and Egyptian Museum in Berlin will conclude the paper.
The manuscript Codex germanicus 1 (Cod. germ. 1) of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg is a fifteenth-century German-language manuscript. It comprises two codicological units and has an especially complex developmental history. To trace this developmental history, neglected until now in the research literature, the manuscript was investigated, for the first time not solely with classical codicological and palaeographical methods, but also with the aid of X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, in order to determine the composition of the writing materials. These methods made it possible, first, to support and check palaeographic findings and, second, to gain information about the stratigraphy of the manuscript where palaeographic methods find their limits – in regard to short entries, rubrications, and non-alphabetical signs.
Advanced codicological studies of Cod. germ. 6 (Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek): Part 2
(2018)
The work presented here follows the article Combining Codicology and X-Ray Spectrometry to Unveil the History of Production of Codex germanicus 6 (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg), published in 2014.1 It confirms the main result of the previous article: the Artusnotiz, the fourth text in the bound manuscript, must have been introduced as the last one. This paper offers further details of the codex production, based on the composition of the black and red inks collected in four measurement campaigns. Furthermore, using imaging μ-XRF, we succeeded in understanding the strong variation of the composition of the red inks in the initials of all the texts except for Parzival and Jeanne d’Arc.
It is well documented that throughout Antiquity, ancient Egyptians used mostly carbon inks as a writing material. In Late Antiquity, some metals started to be added to carbon based inks. We have records of five manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls collection whose carbon inks were found to contain copper Also, lead was recently found as an additive in carbon inks on a charred fragment from Herculaneum. Furthermore, the earliest evidence of iron-gall ink was found in the Book of Proverbs (Codex Ms. Berol. orient. oct. 987) dating to the third fourth centuries ce. It has been suggested that along with carbon and iron-gall inks, there is no reason to think that purely tannin inks were not also in use in Egypt. However, so far, we just have evidence of a copper-tannin ink identified in a number of documents from Egypt in the first third centuries bce. In an attempt to fill this gap in this extremely fragmented scenario during our studies of the socio-geographic history of inks, we arrived at the conclusion that the continuous production of Coptic manuscripts from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages offers a unique opportunity for the historical study of inks across a large geographic area.