About: | Melanie Malzahn |
Position: | Board of Directors |
Nodes: | Communication and Mobility
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The area of the Ancient Silk Road offers unique source material in more than 20 languages from the 1st millennium CE (e.g, Chinese, Middle Indic, Sanskrit, various Middle Iranian languages, Turkish, Mongolian, Syriac, Tibetan and Tocharian); some of them are exclusively attested there. Due to the complexity of the philological and linguistic problems involved in the study of these materials, scholars rarely work with more than one language corpus. As a corollary, texts have become the main focus of research, but may have had a different significance for the societies in question. The COE offers the unique possibility to investigate research questions connected to this specific material on a more comprehensive scale, involving experts from different philologies, history, art history and archaeology. Collaborative research is oriented around the question how the technique of writing reached, spread and altered the societies in the area of interest. This includes studying knowledge and use of writing over time in diverse language groups/communities/regions, interference with other types of cultural performances, i.e. visual arts, and specifically for the case of Turfan the use, spread and involvement of all kinds of narrative performance in the spread of Buddhism.