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Recent research has suggested that some of the inks used in Herculaneum papyri do not consist of pure carbon. Starting from this finding, in June 2018 a preliminary campaign of analysis by means of X-Ray fluorescence (XRF) of external portions removed mechanically from their original rolls in the eighteenth century (the so-called scorze) took place at the Biblioteca Nazionale at Naples. Also in this case, the aim of the survey was to investigate the ink composition in order to detect possible traces of metal. This article sums up the results of this survey.
Hundreds of papyrus rolls, carbonized during the 79CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius, were discovered in 1754 at Herculaneum. Sophisticated mechanical methods for unrolling the best-preserved scrolls have been applied, with varying success. However, such processes have been abandoned, to prevent risk from irremediable damage or loss and to preserve the integrity of the extremely fragile rolls. Following the development of X-ray based non-invasive techniques, attempts to virtually unroll the scrolls were made. The most common ink in Antiquity was carbon-based, and the main element of carbonized papyrus is carbon, making these investigations difficult. However, some attempts with synchrotron X-ray phase-contrast tomography (XPCT) were successful. Recently, the identification of antique inks containing metals raised hope that if some of the inks contain metal the rolls can be virtually unrolled using conventional CT- technique. We investigated the inks of a selection of partially unrolled fragments stored at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli with X-ray fluorescence in order to select the best candidates for tomography. Despite the many difficulties (analysis of several layers sticking together, letters barely visible, difficulty to separate contribution from the ink and from the papyrus, inhomogeneity of the support, fragility of the fragments…), encouraging results were found, with a number of inks from Greek fragments found to contain additions to the soot (Fe, Pb, Cu P).
The first manuscripts from the Qumran caves were found in 1947. Within the following 10 years, clandestine and legal excavations revealed some 900 highly fragmented manuscripts from the late Second Temple period. This collection is generally known as Scrolls of the Judea Desert or Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). For many years after their discovery, text analysis and fragmeents attribution were the main concern of the scholars dealing with the scrolls. The uncertain archaeological provenance of the larger part of the collection added an additional difficulty to the formidable task of sorting some 19000 fragments. After 60 years of scholar research the question of origin, archaeological provenance and correct attribution of the fragmenst are still hotly debated. To dtermine a possible contribution to the debate from the point of view of writing materials, we used otpical and electron microscopy, various X-ray based techniques as well as vibratiional sprectroscopy. We validated our approach with SY - based studies using the advantages of the synchroton radiation source with respect to the benchtop devices. Our laboratory studies showed that often production and storage locality could be distinguished thenks to the specific residues ("fingerprint") they left on the material. Moreover, we have diescovered that diferrent parchment production processses coexisted in the antiquity, and the resulting writing materials can readily be distinguished.
Scientific material analysis of the elemental composition of inks from different strata of a manuscript has the potential to complement scholarly observations using palaeography and philology in reconstructing the history of the manuscript’s production, correction and repair.
There are three typologically different classes of black writing inks: soot inks consist of carbon particles.
While studying the socio-geographic history of inks, division 4.5 (Analysis of cultural artefacts and assets) of the BAM (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung) in Berlin together with the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures in Hamburg has developed a protocol for ink analysis. It consists of a primary screening to determine the type of the ink, and a subsequent in-depth analysis using several spectroscopic techniques.
Using this protocol, scientists can assist scholars in addressing a rather broad range of historical questions that cannot be answered unequivocally through scholarly research alone. Among these are investigations on collaboration between scribes and scriptoria, on the usage and annotation of manuscripts and on their path through time and space in general. This research can thus help to reconstruct the circumstances of the production of written heritage as well as their history and transmission.
To facilitate the dialogue between the scholars and the scientists a simple optical tool was developed to allow the scholars to perform preliminary ink analysis required for formulation of the question that in turn can be answered by scientific in-depth investigations. In this paper, ink types and their identification method is accompanied by examples of the recent work conducted on parchment manuscripts in the Austrian National Library.
While studying the socio-geographic history of inks, division 4.5 of the BAM (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und Prüfung) together with the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures in Hamburg has developed a protocol for ink analysis.
It consists of a primary screening to determine the type of the ink, and a subsequent in-depth analysis using several spectroscopic techniques. The XRF elemental analysis aims primarily at identifying and characterizing metallic components of inks. Besides the instrumental methods, the paper presents an overview of historic inks in the period of transition from carbon inks of the Antiquity to iron-gall inks commonly used in the Middle Ages.
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. Since carbon, plant and iron gall inks belong to different classes of compounds they could be easily distinguished had only pure inks been used. Even these crude observations suggest that the inks used differed greatly in their composition.
Reconstruction of the ink recipes with the help of advanced non-destructive analytical techniques could serve as a powerful accessory for 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. The examples of the ink studies from the collections of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and Egyptian Museum in Berlin will conclude the paper.
Interest in the type of skin used in scriptural materials and preparation methods increased from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. This was due partly to the number of newly discovered fragments and to the invention of new instruments and scientific procedures to identify animal skins and produce qualitative means to demonstrate specific preparation reagents and techniques. The invention of various means of analyzing the DNA of organic materials brought about a revolution in archaeology and in conservation. Difficulties in overcoming contamination of archaeological samples resulted in a number of controversies but also produced advances and improvement in the techniques of ancient DNA analysis and interpretation of results.
The quest for the mixed inks
(2018)
In this article, we would like to share our observations concerning the inks produced by intentionally mixing soot or charcoal with tannin extracts or iron-gall ink. Aside from Zerdoun’s mention in her outstanding review of written sources, “Les encres noires au Moyen-Âge”, this ink category has received little if any attention from scholars and scientists. And yet, if analytically attested, the use of such inks could serve as an additional category to classify and distinguish the writing inks on the historical socio-geographic map of the writing inks we are trying to build.
In an interdisciplinary collaboration, restorers, art historians, and scientists examined Guilio Romano’s The Madonna with the Wash-Basin of 1525 (Dresden State Art Collections). Insights into the painting technique along with art historical comparisons provided the opportunity for a better understanding of the painting’s genesis, in particular concerning an early reworking of the background by the artist. A recovery and reconstruction of the earlier version of the background is now possible. The discovery of zinc in distinct passages of the painting, as well as the grey-black pigment stibnite and glass particles used as a supplement in paint layers are of special interest. The technological investigation initiated a discussion about the circumstances of the revision, as well as the painting’s relation to Vasari’s Lives of Artists.
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.
L'archéométrie est une discipline riche qui peut nous apporter beaucoup d'informations sur l'étude des manuscrits et qui, conjuguée à la paléographie et la codicologie, peut s'apporter un outil précieux pour mieux appréhender les sociétés qui ont produits ces manuscrits.
Nous verrons ici quelques exemples de techniques scientifiques non destructives, principalement appliqués à la Génizah du Caire, appliquées à l'étude des manuscrits.
Parchment
(2019)
This lecture will present history of parchment based on written sources and chemical examination of antique, medieval and modern parchment.
Our studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls writing surfaces show that they 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 studies of the Geniza fragments, in which Babylonian and Palestinian traditions seem to follow the “eastern” and “western” technologies, respectively.
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.
Physico-chemical analyses of writing materials offer insight into various questions associated with historical, cultural, and conservational aspects of manuscript studies. The catalogue of questions that can be addressed with these methods includes authenticity, dating, the attribution of various parts of the text to different scribes and the relation between the primary and secondary texts. Similarly, preservation of the manuscripts requires knowledge of the composition of the original materials versus old repairs, identification of damage, as well as recognition of natural aging and degradation processes. The material sciences can contribute data about the chemical compositions of the writing materials, elucidation of the techniques of their production and the absolute age of organic components, as well as characterization of corrosion effects, evaluation of conservation treatment, and monitoring of the preservation state.
This work presents the non-destructive spectroscopic characterisation of original Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS)parchment fragments from Ronald Reed collection. The fragments are of paramount importance becausethey have never been subjected to any treatment of preservation and restoration, this allows to investi-gate the manufacturing method of real original Jewish parchments. The manufacture of “sacred” Jewishparchments, in fact, is traditionally supposed to use a superficial tannin treatment. To study the DSS frag-ments, it was necessary both to analyse mock-up samples, especially manufactured in order to reproduceancient Oriental Jewish ritual parchments, and to compare the results with those obtained in the analysisof modern and ancient Western Jewish ritual parchments, in order to test the effectiveness of the selectedspectroscopic techniques. Traditionally, the main difference between Oriental and Western traditionalparchment preparation consisted in the dehairing method: enzymatic for Oriental and lime-based forWestern. Moreover, a finishing treatment with tannin was supposed to be applied on ritual Jewish parch-ments. The need of reference samples derives from the knowledge that each parchment preparation,treatment and degradation can induce structural modifications that affect the spectral features. FourierTransform Infrared Spectroscopy by Attenuated Total Reflection (ATR-FTIR), FT-Raman and m-Ramanwere used in this study. The experimental results allowed us to recognise, with different sensitivity, thepresence of tannin by using m-Raman and IR spectroscopies and to prove that not all the archaeologicalsamples were manufactured in the same way with vegetal extracts. Many salts (tschermigite, dolomite,calcite, gypsum and iron carbonate) were found on the surface of DSS fragments. They can derive fromthe degradation processes and storage environment before the discovery or from the manufacture. More-over, the different sensitivities and instrumental characteristics of the used techniques permitted us toestablish an analytical protocol, useful for further studies of similar materials.
In this article, we present two Coptic papyri, P 11934 and P 11935 from the Berlin collection excavated in Ashmunein (ancient Hermopolis) by Otto Rubensohn in 1906. We employ a multi-disciplinary approach that takes into account both their materiality – writing support as well as ink – and their content, as has become ‘best practice’. 1 Material aspects of written documents have traditionally been the purview of papyrologists. Recently developed methods of scientific analysis generate sets of archaeometric data with the potential to improve understanding of the materiality of ancient document production, as well as to yield new evidence for genuine papyrological research questions. To achieve this, a large corpus of comparative data needs to be built. Our contribution offers a first step in this direction. We aim at presenting the papyri, which were selected because of the ink corrosion during conservation work at the Berlin collection, in a format that is exhaustive both for material and textual aspects. The inks from both papyri were analysed using a combination of techniques, contributing to our better understanding of the development of ink technology in Late Antiquity.
Heute stimmen die meisten Gelehrten und Historiker darin überein, dass die Höhlen von Qumran eine Essener-Bibliothek beherberg-ten. Über ihren Ursprung, sowie die Herkunft der einzelnen Schriften, wird noch immer rege debattiert. Der aktuelle Beitrag präsentiert detaillierte Lösungsansätze zu Klärung der Provenienzfrage der Schriftrollen von Qumran.
Our study is dedicated to non-destructive characterization of the support and the inks of the DSS.
To that aim we use micro-XRF, 3D- SY-XRF, different IR methods including synchrotron radiation based reflectance spectroscopy, optical and electron microscopy.
The lecture discusses advantages and the shortcomings of the non-destructive testing approach.
This chapter offers observations and considerations concerning black writing inks encountered in writing supports transmitting documentary and literary texts of the late Antiquity and early Middle Ages. It discusses different types of inks, the Methods of their detection and their use in different times and geographical areas.
While studying the history of inks, division 4.5 of the BAM (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und Prüfung) together with the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures in Hamburg has developed a protocol for ink analysis. It consists of a primary screening to determine the type of the ink, and a subsequent in-depth analysis using several spectroscopic techniques. One of them, X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) aims primarily at establishing the fingerprints of inks containing metals, making it possible to distinguish among different inks.
Our research aims primarily at recreating a socio-geographic history of inks, parchment, and papyrus and includes the comparative analysis of the writing materials of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ink and papyrus in Ancient and Hellenistic Egypt, and inks in documents from various contemporary medieval communities in Fustat (first nucleus of Cairo) as well as other medieval Jewish and Armenian communities.
The presentation shows the panorama of historic inks and our attempt to follow up the transition of the inks from those based on soot to the iron-gall inks commonly used in the Middle Age.
Natural sciences play auxiliary role in the studies of manuscripts. The success of their contribution depends strongly on the formulation of the question and the choice of the methods to obtain the requested answer. Therefore, one should try to go beyond the understanding of the basic principles of the scientific analysis.
We will start with a glance at the basic principles of the techniques used in the material science for determination of the elemental composition (X-ray emission) and molecular composition (FTIR & Raman). We will move then to the bench and mobile equipment commonly used in the field of cultural heritage. At the end we will choose a question to be answered and design an ideal experiment that will be modified according to the limitations dictated by on-site conditions.
In the ateliers in the afternoon we will
a) compare two XRF devices that differ in their spatial resolution;
b) use a high resolution microscope (Keyence) to obtain a close look at writing surfaces and materials;
c) we will learn to determine the type of the inks with the help of another microscope (DinoLite AD413T-12V), a usb microscope with visible, UV and NIR illumination;
d) we will learn to use FTIR-ATR device for determination of the type of the writing surface;
e) We will use mobile Raman device for identification of pigments.
The Scythica Vindobonensia, the new fragments on Gothic incursions into Roman provinces in the Balkans in the middle of the third century AD that were revealed some years ago in a Greek palimpsest at the Austrian National Library in Vienna (ÖNB), are commonly considered as one of the most important additions of the last decades to the corpus of texts from classical Antiquity. Tere is a high degree of confdence among scholars in supposing that the fragments come from the lost work Scythica written in Greek by the third-century historian P. Herennius Dexippus (Δέξιππος) of Athens. The new fragments have hence also been called Dexippus Vindobonensis. In his Scythica, Dexippus recorded wars of the Romans with the Goths (and other tribes) whom he called Scythians.
The work had been hitherto known only from excerpts and quotes by later authors. Eight pages of a Byzantine manuscript copy of the ancient text have survived hidden underneath the visible surface of the last four parchment folios of the Vienna manuscript Historicus graecus 73, f. 192r -195v4. The copy is written in a Greek calligraphic minuscule which has been estimated by palaeographers to be of the middle or the second half of the eleventh century. In the thirteenth century, the text (on each of the eight pages arranged in one column, with 30 lines per page) was washed of the parchment and the valuable material made from animal skin was re-used for Christian texts. The new writing largely covered the faded remnants of the original text. It thus became hidden from the human eye for more than seven hundred years. Its discovery by Jana Grusková, a classical philologist specialized in the transmission of Greek texts, resulted from a systematic review of all Greek palimpsests kept at the Austrian National Library in Vienna at the beginning of the twenty-first century and a detailed examination of the four folios in 2007-20097.
The scribe of ‘Erfurt 7’, a thirteenth-century Torah scroll now kept in Berlin, initially left blank spaces for the divine appellations Elohim ( אלהים ) and YHWH Elohim ( ,(יהוה אלהים which were filled in during a second stage of writing. The appearance of the ink employed to write the appellations was significantly darker than that of the surrounding ink.
X-ray fluorescence analysis (XRF) has shown that the light and dark brown inks had similar elemental compositions, but contained different ratios of iron to potassium, which could be explained by the use of different batches of ink.
According to some medieval sources, the divine appellations were sometimes filled in during a second stage of writing in the presence of ten men from the Jewish community. In Erfurt 7, the two-stage procedure was only performed in the first 1.5 columns of the original sheets, suggesting it may have been part of a public ceremony inaugurating the writing of the divine names in the scroll. Erfurt 7 emerges from this study not only as a ritual object used for liturgy, but as a rallying point for the Jews of Erfurt to come together as a community to express their reverence for the written form of God’s name. The divine name YHWH ( יהוה ) was written in a smaller script than the surrounding text on three replacement sheets using the same two-stage procedure. The ink used on the replacement sheets contained zinc, which is characteristic of other Erfurt manuscripts as well. This suggests that Erfurt was the place where the scroll was used, cherished and eventually repaired.
Inks and pigments
(2019)
The writing materials used in various cultures and epochs can be divided into two groups. The first comprises materials that write themselves, producing script by rubbing their own material off onto the writing surface. It includes charcoal, graphite, chalk, raddle, and metal styluses. Depending on the material and consistency, these are cut or pressed to make styluses and then used for writing.
The second group comprises all coloring liquids that are applied to the writing surface with a quill, pen, or printing block. It includes inks made from dye solutions (for example, tannin inks) and those made from pigment dispersions (for example, sepia, soot, and bister inks). The latter are sometimes also rubbed as pastes into letters incised into the writing surface, where they increase visual contrast.
Due to the variety of recipes and the natural origin of raw materials, there is a wide range of different components and impurities in writing materials.
Soluble inks (Tinten)
Soluble inks are based mainly on dyes forming a water solution. Colored inks were manufactured with different plant or insect dyes (e.g. Brazil wood, kermes). To stabilize the volatile material, the dyes were mixed with a mordant (e.g., alum).
Brown plant inks – best-known as blackthorn or Theophilus’ inks – are usually produced from the blackthorn bark and wine. In the early European Middle Ages, inks of this kind were widely used in the production of manuscripts in monasteries. Usually, they are light brown, so sometimes small amounts of iron sulfate were added, which led to what was called an “imperfect” iron gall ink. The difference between “classic” iron gall ink and such imperfect ink is therefore not clear: the distinction is not possible, especially with the naked eye.
Dispersion inks (Tuschen)
According to its generic recipe, one of the oldest black writing materials is produced by mixing soot with a binder dissolved in a small amount of water. Thus, along with soot, binders such as gum arabic (ancient Egypt) or animal glue (China) are among the main components of soot inks. From Pliny’s detailed account of the manufacture of various soot-based inks, we learn that, despite its seeming simplicity, producing pure soot of high quality was not an easy task in Antiquity. Therefore, we expect to find various detectable additives that might be indicative of the time and place of production. One such carbon ink requires the addition of copper sulfate . The experimental discovery of this ink in 1990 led to a misleading expression “metal ink” that is sometimes found in the literature.
Colored dispersion inks based on pigments such as orpiment, cinnabar, or azurite have been known since Antiquity. Natural or artificially produced minerals are finely ground and dispersed in a binding medium. As in soot inks, water-soluble binders such as gum arabic or egg white were used.
Iron gall ink (Eisengallustinten)
Iron gall inks are a borderline case between these two groups. They are produced from four basic ingredients: galls, vitriol as the main source of iron, gum arabic as a binding media, and an aqueous medium such as wine, beer, or vinegar. By mixing gallic acid with iron sulfate, a water-soluble ferrous gallate complex is formed; this product belongs to the type “soluble inks”. Due to its solubility, the ink penetrates the writing support’s surface, making it difficult to erase. Exposure to oxygen leads to the formation of insoluble black ferric gallate pigment, i.e., “dispersion ink”.
Natural vitriol consists of a varying mixture of metal sulfates. Since for ink making it was obtained from different mines and by various techniques, inks contain many other metals, like copper, aluminum, zinc, and manganese, in addition to the iron sulfate. These metals do not contribute to color formation in the ink solution, but possibly change the chemical properties of the inks.
In the recent years multispectral imaging and X-ray Fluorescence element mapping have established themselves as a well working two step approach, when dealing with faded, erased or overwritten text in iron gall ink. During the last years a lot was done to improve the mere technical side of the techniques. Especially in the case of XRF mapping experiments the acquisition speed needed to be increased to allow mapping in the high resolution demanded by the challenges at hand. High resolution in moderate times can now be achieved, but with the price of proportionally increased amount of data that needs to be processed ideally in parallel to the measurement. The classical approach in XRF spectroscopy of elemental fitting of the spectral data does not even come close to fulfill any on the fly processing time constraints and will consume too much processing time in the foreseeable future. In this paper we will discuss the applicability of modern statistical data processing methods to XRF mapping of iron gall ink palimpsests. We will present a comparison of a new approach based on principle and independent component analysis (PCA and ICA) and the standard element mapping method. We will show that a reduction in processing time of almost two orders of magnitude can easily be achieved.
An interdisciplinary approach to the study of manuscript traditions is here applied to the analysis of the leaves from the White Monastery, one of the greatest centres of literary production in Late Antique Egypt. In the framework of the ‘PAThs’ project, archaeometric analyses complement the information pieced together by a range of disciplines in the field of humanities. The use of different complementary analytical techniques provides information on the type of ink used and its elemental composition, unveiling interesting details regarding the materials and methodology of manufacturing of writing media. Moreover, this contribution takes a step forward and discusses the possible existence of a regional arrangement in the elemental composition revealed in the inks studied.
Our research aims primarily at recreating a socio-geographic history of inks, parchment, and papyrus and includes the comparative analysis of the writing materials of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ink and papyrus in Ancient and Hellenistic Egypt, and inks in documents from various contemporary medieval communities in Fustat (first nucleus of Cairo) as well as other medieval Jewish and Armenian communities.
The presentation shows the panorama of historic inks and our attempt to follow up the transition of the inks from those based on soot to the iron-gall inks commonly used in the Middle Age.
The evolution and socio-geographic distribution of writing inks from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages are one of the foci of our investigative work at the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM) in Berlin and the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Hamburg University.
This presentation will examine the inks used by Jews in the in different geographical zones try to correlate the results of the material analysis with written records and existing traditions. We will compare the inks proposed by Maimonides, who lived in 12th-century Egypt, with the considerations of Rashi, who lived in 11th-century northern France, and see that they both advocated use of the inks commonly known and produced in their respective regions. It is Maimonides who proposes to add tannins to the soot inks, but rejects the metallic salt, both of which were practices that were well attested in contemporary Arabic recipes for making ink. In contrast, Rashi was favourable to employing the plant inks in use in contemporary Northern Europe.
Der Band 5 der N.i.Ke.-Schriftenreihe präsentiert den aktuellen Stand materialwissenschaftlicher und bildgebender Verfahren, die bei der Untersuchung von Zeichnungen Anwendung finden. Im ersten Teil der Publikation werden die klassischen Zeichnungsträger und Zeichnungsmaterialien vorgestellt. Der mittlere Teil der Publikation beschreibt die relevanten materialwissenschaftlichen und bildgebenden Verfahren. Der letzte Teil diskutiert anhand einiger Fallbeispiele die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Methoden.
This paper addresses the sensitive issue of authenticating unprovenanced manuscripts of high monetary value to certify they are genuine. Over the last decade, the popularity of material studies of manuscripts using non-destructive testing (NDT) has increased enormously. These studies are held in especially high esteem in the case of suspicious writings due to the methodological rigour they are reputed to contribute to debate. We would like to stress that materials analysis alone cannot prove that an object is genuine. Unfortunately, audiences with a humanities background often tend to disregard the technical details and treat any published interpretation of instrumental analysis as an objective finding. Four examples are outlined here to illustrate what questionable contributions the natural sciences can make in describing manuscripts that have actually been forged.
The paper presents the results of the radiocarbon dating and ink analysis of a leather fragment bearing an important liturgical text in Hebrew from the early centuries of the common era. The work initiated by the scholarly interest in the text stresses the importance of the date and materiality of the manuscripts and closes with an appeal to the curators of manuscript collections.
The current state of preservation of the DSS results from the synergetic effect of various factors such as great age, post-discovery treatments, poor storage conditions, environmental influences and exhibitions. With rare exceptions, neither the initial state nor a list of the treatments performed on each DSS fragment is known. Reconstruction of the individual fragment history will have to rely upon advanced analytical techniques to identify the treatments and their effects.
Management of the scrolls may be divided roughly into three periods: a) the scholarly archiving period, from 1948 to the mid-1960s; b) first attempts at conservation, from the mid-1960s to late-1980s; c) Israel Antiquities Authority Scrolls Lab, from 1991 onwards.
The Cairo Geniza is an “archive” discovered in the 19th century in Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, a district in Old Cairo (Egypt). The collection of mostly Jewish documents that vary in genres, languages and writing supports contains a large number of early medieval Hebrew manuscripts.
The Geniza provides sources for the literary, linguistic, historical studies of the various aspects Jewish life. As the documents attest, at least two Jewish communities co-existed in Fustat up to 11th century: a so-called Babylonian and Palestinian. These communities had different leaders, different traditions and lived independently. The differences seem to manifest themselves also in the paleographical, codicological and some material properties of the manuscripts produced by each community.
The aim of this project is to compare the inks used in the Jewish documents depending on different variables: support (paper, parchment), purpose of the manuscript (legal, private, religious), provenance of the scribe. For the determination of the inks type and composition we had to choose non-invasive, non-destructive and portable techniques to analyze the corpus directly on-situ.
The analyses were carried out with a micro-X-ray spectrometer ArtTAX® (Bruker GmbH) and a digital stereomicroscope features built-in LED illumination at 395 nm and 940nm, Dino Lite.
We would like to stress that though the methods of material analysis listed above have been successfully employed in the field of cultural heritage and conservation including ancient and medieval manuscripts they have not yet been used to study fragments from the Cairo Genizah. Therefore, we believe that this research project is a pioneering study that will provide new insights into the history of Hebrew writing materials, their production techniques and materials and, thus, contribute new data to the field of Hebrew paleography.
Black writing materials of different types and compositions have varied in use over time and different geographical regions. With this paper, we would like to contribute to their study by listing and reviewing recipes for black writing inks that were in circulation in the Carolingian Empire as well as by referencing the archaeometric analyses of the black inks used in the manuscripts. The studies presented here that involved the humanities and natural sciences provide new insights into how the scholars of the early Medieval Ages organized manuscripts.
Ancient Inks
(2023)
In the last decade scientists and scholars have accumulated more knowledge on black ink used for writing in Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
Ready availability of non-destructive testing instruments employed in interdisciplinary projects on historic manuscripts have made it possible to determine the composition of ink and to compare it with the extant records.
While studying the socio-geographic history of inks, division 4.5 of the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und Prüfung (BAM) together with the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) in Hamburg has developed a non-invasive protocol for ink analysis. It consists of a primary reflectographic screening to determine the type of the ink (soot, tannin or iron-gall) and a subsequent in-depth analysis using several spectroscopic techniques: X-ray fluorescence (XRF), Infrared and Raman spectroscopies. The first of them, XRF elemental analysis aims at establishing the unique fingerprints of inks containing metals or trace elements in carbon inks. In addition, we use Raman analysis to identify so-called mixed inks, an ink category that received little attention so far. Finally, with the help of IR spectroscopy we obtain information about the ink binders.
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.
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.
Typology of Inks
Archives and museums around the world contain a vast number of manuscripts that were written in different inks: carbon inks, plant inks, iron-gall inks and mixed inks. Yet most archaeometric studies of manuscripts focus on the palette of pigments found in illuminated manuscripts whereas identification of the inks is still largely based on cultural-historical studies and visual inspections. One of the reasons of this disproportion in the studies can be explained by the properties of Raman spectroscopy, the technique of choice for identification of pigments. In contrast, this technique is only partially viable when dealing with organic colourants. Brown and Clark discuss these difficulties and the uncertainties of identification of iron-gall inks by Raman spectroscopy in their pioneering work on early medieval Anglo-Saxon manuscripts (K. Brown and R. Clark 2004). To facilitate instrumental analysis of inks, we have developed a protocol that starts with the identification of the inks type (Rabin et al. 2012) which doesn’t require complicated instrumentation and can be carried out by paleographers and codicologists.
Three typological ink classes
The black writing materials used in manuscript production in Antiquity und Middle Ages can be sorted in three typologically different ink classes: soot, plant and iron-gall. Soot ink is a fine dispersion of carbon pigments in a water soluble binding agent; plant-based ink consists of a solution of the tannins extracted from gallnuts or tree bark; iron-gall ink, is produced by mixing a soluble compound of iron (II) with gallic or tannic acid extracted from gallnuts or tree bark. Therefore, iron-gall ink presents a boundary case between solution and dispersion ink, in which a water-soluble preliminary stage oxidizes and evolves into a black, insoluble precipitate similar to the carbon pigments when the writing is exposed to air (Krekel 1999). The additional category of mixed inks, i.e. inks produced by addition of various metals to the soot inks or intentional mixing of iron-gall and soot - based inks started attracting scholarly attention only recently because their significance was established only a short while ago (Brun et al. 2016, Colini 2018, Nehring et al. 2021). We suggest that plant and mixed inks build a bridge from the carbon ink of Antiquity to the properly formulated iron-gall ink that became a standard black ink from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century when it gave way to modern inks.
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).