Project acronym ACROSSBORDERS
Project Across ancient borders and cultures: An Egyptian microcosm in Sudan during the 2nd millennium BC
Researcher (PI) Julia Budka
Host Institution (HI) LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAET MUENCHEN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary Pharaonic Egypt is commonly known for its pyramids and tomb treasures. The present knowledge of Egyptian everyday life and social structures derives mostly from mortuary records associated with the upper classes, whereas traces of ordinary life from domestic sites are generally disregarded. Settlement archaeology in Egypt and Nubia (Ancient North Sudan) is still in its infancy; it is timely to strenghten this field. Responsible for the pottery at three major settlement sites (Abydos and Elephantine in Egypt; Sai Island in Sudan), the PI is in a unique position to co-ordinate a research project on settlement patterns in Northeast Africa of the 2nd millennium BC based on the detailed analysis of material remains. The selected case studies situated across ancient and modern borders and of diverse environmental and cultural preconditions, show very similar archaeological remains. Up to now, no attempt has been made to explain this situation in detail.
The focus of the project is the well-preserved, only partially explored site of Sai Island, seemingly an Egyptian microcosm in New Kingdom Upper Nubia. Little time is left to conduct the requisite large-scale archaeology as Sai is endangered by the planned high dam of Dal. With the application of microarchaeology we will introduce an approach that is new in Egyptian settlement archaeology. Our interdisciplinary research will result in novel insights into (a) multifaceted lives on Sai at a micro-spatial level and (b) domestic life in 2nd millennium BC Egypt and Nubia from a macroscopic view. The present understanding of the political situation in Upper Nubia during the New Kingdom as based on written records will be significantly enlarged by the envisaged approach. Furthermore, in reconstructing Sai Island as “home away from home”, the project presents a showcase study of what we can learn about acculturation and adaptation from ancient cultures, in this case from the coexistence of Egyptians and Nubians
Summary
Pharaonic Egypt is commonly known for its pyramids and tomb treasures. The present knowledge of Egyptian everyday life and social structures derives mostly from mortuary records associated with the upper classes, whereas traces of ordinary life from domestic sites are generally disregarded. Settlement archaeology in Egypt and Nubia (Ancient North Sudan) is still in its infancy; it is timely to strenghten this field. Responsible for the pottery at three major settlement sites (Abydos and Elephantine in Egypt; Sai Island in Sudan), the PI is in a unique position to co-ordinate a research project on settlement patterns in Northeast Africa of the 2nd millennium BC based on the detailed analysis of material remains. The selected case studies situated across ancient and modern borders and of diverse environmental and cultural preconditions, show very similar archaeological remains. Up to now, no attempt has been made to explain this situation in detail.
The focus of the project is the well-preserved, only partially explored site of Sai Island, seemingly an Egyptian microcosm in New Kingdom Upper Nubia. Little time is left to conduct the requisite large-scale archaeology as Sai is endangered by the planned high dam of Dal. With the application of microarchaeology we will introduce an approach that is new in Egyptian settlement archaeology. Our interdisciplinary research will result in novel insights into (a) multifaceted lives on Sai at a micro-spatial level and (b) domestic life in 2nd millennium BC Egypt and Nubia from a macroscopic view. The present understanding of the political situation in Upper Nubia during the New Kingdom as based on written records will be significantly enlarged by the envisaged approach. Furthermore, in reconstructing Sai Island as “home away from home”, the project presents a showcase study of what we can learn about acculturation and adaptation from ancient cultures, in this case from the coexistence of Egyptians and Nubians
Max ERC Funding
1 497 460 €
Duration
Start date: 2012-12-01, End date: 2018-04-30
Project acronym BRONZEAGETIN
Project Tin Isotopes and the Sources of Bronze Age Tin in the Old World
Researcher (PI) Ernst Pernicka
Host Institution (HI) RUPRECHT-KARLS-UNIVERSITAET HEIDELBERG
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2012-ADG_20120411
Summary "This multidisciplinary project comprising archaeology, history, geochemistry, and geology aims at the decipherment of the enigma of the origin of a material that emerged in the third millennium BCE and gave an entire cultural epoch its name, namely the alloy of copper and tin called bronze. While copper deposits are relatively widely distributed there are only very few tin deposits known in the Old World (Europe, the Mediterranean basin and southwest Asia). Since the late 19th century archaeologists have discussed the question of the provenance of tin for the production of the earliest bronzes without any definite answer. The enigma has even grown over the past decades, because it turned out that the earliest bronzes appear in a wide area stretching from the Aegean to the Persian Gulf that is geologically devoid of any tin deposits. There is tin in western and central Europe and there is also tin in central Asia. Thus, tin or bronze seems to have been traded over large distances but it is unknown in which direction.
Now a new method has become available that offers the chance to trace ancient tin via tin isotope signatures. It was found that the isotope ratios of tin exhibit small but measurable variations in nature making different tin deposits identifiable so that bronze objects can in principle be related to specific ore deposits. It is proposed to apply for the first time this new technology to characterize all known tin deposits in the Old World and relate them to bronze and tin artefacts of the third and second millennia BCE. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary study will increase our understanding of Bronze Age metal trade beyond surmise and speculation with vast implications for the reconstruction of socio-economic relations within and between Bronze Age societies. The impact will be a major advance in our understanding of the earliest complex societies with craft specialization and the formation of cities and empires."
Summary
"This multidisciplinary project comprising archaeology, history, geochemistry, and geology aims at the decipherment of the enigma of the origin of a material that emerged in the third millennium BCE and gave an entire cultural epoch its name, namely the alloy of copper and tin called bronze. While copper deposits are relatively widely distributed there are only very few tin deposits known in the Old World (Europe, the Mediterranean basin and southwest Asia). Since the late 19th century archaeologists have discussed the question of the provenance of tin for the production of the earliest bronzes without any definite answer. The enigma has even grown over the past decades, because it turned out that the earliest bronzes appear in a wide area stretching from the Aegean to the Persian Gulf that is geologically devoid of any tin deposits. There is tin in western and central Europe and there is also tin in central Asia. Thus, tin or bronze seems to have been traded over large distances but it is unknown in which direction.
Now a new method has become available that offers the chance to trace ancient tin via tin isotope signatures. It was found that the isotope ratios of tin exhibit small but measurable variations in nature making different tin deposits identifiable so that bronze objects can in principle be related to specific ore deposits. It is proposed to apply for the first time this new technology to characterize all known tin deposits in the Old World and relate them to bronze and tin artefacts of the third and second millennia BCE. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary study will increase our understanding of Bronze Age metal trade beyond surmise and speculation with vast implications for the reconstruction of socio-economic relations within and between Bronze Age societies. The impact will be a major advance in our understanding of the earliest complex societies with craft specialization and the formation of cities and empires."
Max ERC Funding
2 340 800 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-08-01, End date: 2018-07-31
Project acronym ILM
Project Islamic Law materialized: Arabic legal documents (8th to 15th century) (ILM)
Researcher (PI) Hans Christian Müller
Host Institution (HI) CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2008-AdG
Summary The project examines edited and unedited Arabic legal documents from a new comparative perspective. Documents, immediate manifestations of legal practice, were instruments to assure subjective rights of persons for whom the copy had been issued. Most studies on early Islamic legal practice however focus on literary sources (notarial manuals, responsae, juridical treaties) and neglect documents mainly for two reasons: 1) cursive handwriting and technical language render their deciphering difficult; 2) the existing collections come from various provenances which hindered until now a synthetic analysis. This project inverses the focus with a new historical perspective: Thanks to its innovative full text database (CALD) that analyses documents by functional components and sequence-patterns, the project reveals relevant variations in structure and juridical clauses among many documents, in great detail and from multiple aspects. Even if existing studies on specimens from various regions establish a general conformity of these documents with Islamic law, the PI s analysis of the 14th-century Jerusalem corpus illustrated, for the first time, how private notarisation (of legal transactions) and court documents (with judicial elements) were used complementary to apply the complex rules of Islamic procedural law. The CALD-database facilitates comparing and deciphering legal documents. The research group will use this methodology with three under-examined corpuses from al-Andalus, Egypt and Palestine from the 13th to the 15th century, and compare these to other edited documents from Central Asia, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Muslim Spain (8th-15th centuries). This approach aims to a) develop a sophisticated typology of legal documents and their components, b) compare various notarial practices as expression of applied Islamic law, guaranteed by judicial institutions, which leads to c) pre-modern Islamic law as a uniform reference system within multi-faceted legal systems.
Summary
The project examines edited and unedited Arabic legal documents from a new comparative perspective. Documents, immediate manifestations of legal practice, were instruments to assure subjective rights of persons for whom the copy had been issued. Most studies on early Islamic legal practice however focus on literary sources (notarial manuals, responsae, juridical treaties) and neglect documents mainly for two reasons: 1) cursive handwriting and technical language render their deciphering difficult; 2) the existing collections come from various provenances which hindered until now a synthetic analysis. This project inverses the focus with a new historical perspective: Thanks to its innovative full text database (CALD) that analyses documents by functional components and sequence-patterns, the project reveals relevant variations in structure and juridical clauses among many documents, in great detail and from multiple aspects. Even if existing studies on specimens from various regions establish a general conformity of these documents with Islamic law, the PI s analysis of the 14th-century Jerusalem corpus illustrated, for the first time, how private notarisation (of legal transactions) and court documents (with judicial elements) were used complementary to apply the complex rules of Islamic procedural law. The CALD-database facilitates comparing and deciphering legal documents. The research group will use this methodology with three under-examined corpuses from al-Andalus, Egypt and Palestine from the 13th to the 15th century, and compare these to other edited documents from Central Asia, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Muslim Spain (8th-15th centuries). This approach aims to a) develop a sophisticated typology of legal documents and their components, b) compare various notarial practices as expression of applied Islamic law, guaranteed by judicial institutions, which leads to c) pre-modern Islamic law as a uniform reference system within multi-faceted legal systems.
Max ERC Funding
1 023 021 €
Duration
Start date: 2009-01-01, End date: 2013-12-31
Project acronym LeftMEXile3460
Project Left-wing Exile in Mexico, 1934-1960
Researcher (PI) Aribert Johann Heinrich Reimann
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAET ZU KOELN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary This ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant will support the research of one PI and two post-doctoral researchers towards a transnational and transdisciplinary history of left-wing exile in Mexico between the mid-1930s and the late 1950s. During this period, Mexico witnessed the arrival of tens of thousands of political refugees from Europe and later a smaller number of émigrés from the U.S.. Mexican authorities not only actively welcomed these communities of exile but encouraged and supported their political and cultural activities to establish Mexico as an arena for left-wing internationalism. Outside agencies, such as right-wing European governments, the Comintern, and the U.S.-American FBI and OSS/CIA were actively engaged in monitoring and influencing these communities in Mexico. The researchers will draw on new source materials from the Comintern Archives, Mexican state and university archives, and the U.S. National Archives and the Hoover Foundation alongside the rich collections of European archives to prepare studies that cut across the conventional orientation by source provenance, national perspectives, or disciplinary specialisation. The aim is to arrive at a topographical understanding of exile as a political practice manifested in meetings, lectures, political publications, and interventions in domestic Mexican and world political discourse, mechanisms of a transfer of knowledge in education policies and the transnational public sphere, cultural representations of the émigrés’ engagement with their host nation in literature, art, and architecture, in music, photography and painting, and prevailing perceptions and constructions of ethnicity and gender. The results of this research will be presented at two project workshops and one international conference. The project will generate three monographs and one edited volume with contributions from leading international scholars.
Summary
This ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant will support the research of one PI and two post-doctoral researchers towards a transnational and transdisciplinary history of left-wing exile in Mexico between the mid-1930s and the late 1950s. During this period, Mexico witnessed the arrival of tens of thousands of political refugees from Europe and later a smaller number of émigrés from the U.S.. Mexican authorities not only actively welcomed these communities of exile but encouraged and supported their political and cultural activities to establish Mexico as an arena for left-wing internationalism. Outside agencies, such as right-wing European governments, the Comintern, and the U.S.-American FBI and OSS/CIA were actively engaged in monitoring and influencing these communities in Mexico. The researchers will draw on new source materials from the Comintern Archives, Mexican state and university archives, and the U.S. National Archives and the Hoover Foundation alongside the rich collections of European archives to prepare studies that cut across the conventional orientation by source provenance, national perspectives, or disciplinary specialisation. The aim is to arrive at a topographical understanding of exile as a political practice manifested in meetings, lectures, political publications, and interventions in domestic Mexican and world political discourse, mechanisms of a transfer of knowledge in education policies and the transnational public sphere, cultural representations of the émigrés’ engagement with their host nation in literature, art, and architecture, in music, photography and painting, and prevailing perceptions and constructions of ethnicity and gender. The results of this research will be presented at two project workshops and one international conference. The project will generate three monographs and one edited volume with contributions from leading international scholars.
Max ERC Funding
957 563 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-04-01, End date: 2018-03-31
Project acronym POR
Project Perception of Other Religions
Researcher (PI) Hans-Werner Goetz
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAET HAMBURG
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2008-AdG
Summary "The aim of the research project is to provide an extensive analysis of the perception of other religions and their members by Christian authors of the Early and High Middle Ages from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. For the first time ever, the medieval perception of heathens, Jews, Muslims, heretics and Orthodox Christians, as they are seen by Occidental Catholics, is explored in a comparative and comprehensive manner. The project, therefore, will provide an invaluable contribution to religious thinking, the understanding of religion, the concept of ""the other"" and the (religious) concept of self."
Summary
"The aim of the research project is to provide an extensive analysis of the perception of other religions and their members by Christian authors of the Early and High Middle Ages from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. For the first time ever, the medieval perception of heathens, Jews, Muslims, heretics and Orthodox Christians, as they are seen by Occidental Catholics, is explored in a comparative and comprehensive manner. The project, therefore, will provide an invaluable contribution to religious thinking, the understanding of religion, the concept of ""the other"" and the (religious) concept of self."
Max ERC Funding
580 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2009-04-01, End date: 2012-03-31
Project acronym THESIS
Project Theology, Education, Scholastic Institution and Scholars-network: dialogues between the University of Paris and the new Universities from Central and Eastern Europe during the Late
Researcher (PI) Monica Brinzei
Host Institution (HI) CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary The THESIS project proposes a pioneering study of a coherent corpus of medieval manuscripts consisting of all the commentaries on the Sentences composed in Paris and in the new universities from Central Europe between 1350-1450. A Sentences commentary is a core component of the medieval academic curriculum, a collection of theses that scholars had to defend in the universities in order to obtain the title of master or doctor of theology; it is actually the unique equivalent of our modern PhD thesis.
This investigation aims to provide new information concerning the intellectual atmosphere inside the European universities in an attempt to respond to various historical questions: How do the Sentences commentaries of this period lead to the formation of a European university identity? Who are the masters of the time? What is the importance of a Sentences commentary (the modern PhD) in the development of a individual intellectual career during the late Middle Ages? What are the relations and exchanges between the University of Paris and the new universities of Central Europe? Which are the commentaries acquired (by purchase and thus at the request of the readers) in the university libraries of this epoch and in this area of Europe? What are the cultural exchanges between secular masters, monks and friars? How do the religious orders constitute an important factor in the formation of a network for the transfer of knowledge in the universities?
Research in the archives (mainly little known ones from Eastern Europe), the study of the manuscripts, the digital edition of the texts and the development of new IT tools for our field will be key components of our project, contributing to a better understanding of a hidden part of European intellectual history. Our project is built upon a strategy promoting erudition (codicology, palaeography, textual criticism), an interdisciplinary scientific approach, and exchange and dialogue between scholars from Western and Eastern Europe.
Summary
The THESIS project proposes a pioneering study of a coherent corpus of medieval manuscripts consisting of all the commentaries on the Sentences composed in Paris and in the new universities from Central Europe between 1350-1450. A Sentences commentary is a core component of the medieval academic curriculum, a collection of theses that scholars had to defend in the universities in order to obtain the title of master or doctor of theology; it is actually the unique equivalent of our modern PhD thesis.
This investigation aims to provide new information concerning the intellectual atmosphere inside the European universities in an attempt to respond to various historical questions: How do the Sentences commentaries of this period lead to the formation of a European university identity? Who are the masters of the time? What is the importance of a Sentences commentary (the modern PhD) in the development of a individual intellectual career during the late Middle Ages? What are the relations and exchanges between the University of Paris and the new universities of Central Europe? Which are the commentaries acquired (by purchase and thus at the request of the readers) in the university libraries of this epoch and in this area of Europe? What are the cultural exchanges between secular masters, monks and friars? How do the religious orders constitute an important factor in the formation of a network for the transfer of knowledge in the universities?
Research in the archives (mainly little known ones from Eastern Europe), the study of the manuscripts, the digital edition of the texts and the development of new IT tools for our field will be key components of our project, contributing to a better understanding of a hidden part of European intellectual history. Our project is built upon a strategy promoting erudition (codicology, palaeography, textual criticism), an interdisciplinary scientific approach, and exchange and dialogue between scholars from Western and Eastern Europe.
Max ERC Funding
1 494 784 €
Duration
Start date: 2012-10-01, End date: 2018-07-31
