The Development of Literacy in the Caucasian Territories

Project Information

DeLiCaTe

Grant agreement ID: 101019006

DOI

10.3030/101019006

EC signature date 3 June 2021

Start date 1 April 2022

End date 31 March 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 499 958,00

EU contribution

€ 2 499 958,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DeLiCaTe (The Development of Literacy in the Caucasian Territories)

Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The development of specific alphabetic scripts in the context of Christianisation in the early 5th century CE meant the beginning of literacy and, by consequence, a decisive step towards independent statehood for three distinct ethnic groups in the Caucasus: Armenians, Georgians, and the so-called ‘Caucasian Albanians’. While the former two developed their written heritage steadily until today, the literacy of the ‘Albanians’ ended with the Arab conquest in about the 8th century, and only a few specimens of their language have survived, mostly in palimpsests detected in St Catherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai. For Armenian and Georgian, too, only a limited number of original text witnesses have been preserved from the ‘early’ centuries, i.e. the period between the 5th and 10th centuries CE, and excluding stone inscriptions, most of these, too, are palimpsest materials.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, considerable progress has been made in the analysis of the oldest written documents of the three languages preserved in palimpsest form, and the results have provided substantial new insights into their historical development. These insights, which have hitherto been confined to the individual languages, are now for the first time ever being brought into a cross-language synthesis, which will yield a completely new view on the emergence and spread of writing in the region, taking into account the interrelations between the three languages and the Christian cultures represented by them as well as the influence of external religious and linguistic factors.
Led by Jost Gippert, the project 'The Development of Literacy in the Caucasian Territories (DeLiCaTe)' officially started on 1 April 2022 at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg. The six-member team, which at present also includes Anahit Avagyan, Emilio Bonfiglio, Mariam Kamarauli, Eka Kvirkvelia, and Hasmik Sargsyan, takes into account palaeographic, linguistic, codicological as well as philological aspects, with a view to develop the first comprehensive picture of the development of literacy in the Caucasian territories.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In accordance with the material basis outlined above, the members of the team have been investigating palimpsests and other relevant textual sources from the region, including the inscriptional material that has come down to us. In the course of the project, the actual amount of relevant palimpsests has been determined for the first time – beyond the two palimpest codices of Mount Sinai representing the only manuscript heritage of Caucasian Albanian, both overwritten in Georgian, and beyond the more than 10,000 palimpsest pages that have been recorded in a 2017 catalogue of the collection of Georgian manuscripts in the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts, Tbilisi/Georgia, a total of more than 10,000 pages of Armenian have been identified now, with more than 7,000 of them being stored in the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Matenadaran) in Yerevan/Armenia, nearly all of them hitherto undescribed and unexplored. In the course of the project work, the content of about one half of the latter materials has been identified, with decisive results for the development of Caucasian literacy: beyond important ancient witnesses of the Bible translation, they turned out to contain, among others, materials from hagiography (legends of saints read during services, partly unedited so far), historiography (parts of the historical works by Agathangelos, Ełishe, and Movses Khorenatsi), and homiletics (translations of works by Irenaeus of Lyon, John Chrysostom, and other church fathers), usually representing the oldest witnesses of the given texts available and partly even the only witnesses of otherwise lost texts. For the palimpsests stored in Armenia, the necessary basis for the work, multispectral images of all individual pages of the palimpsests, were provided by the Matenadaran; for some important palimpsests kept in European repositories (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France; Leiden, University Library; Oslo, Schøyen Collection; Cambridge, University Library), the project members undertook imaging campaigns in cooperation with the laboratories of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures. The Armenian palimpsest with Georgian overwriting kept in the Graz University Library and the Georgian-Georgian palimpsest of Leipzig University Library could be analysed in Hamburg; for other palimpsests outside of the Caucasus, especially those of Mount Sinai and Mount Athos, the project could rely upon existing multispectral images.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

As a preliminary result of the investigations based on palimpsests and inscriptional matter, the project has revealed remarkable traces, shared by the three Caucasian traditions, of an early first translation of Biblical texts (Gospels, Acts, Epistles, Prophets) based on Syriac models; this is now being worked out in detail. Beyond this, a common fund of hagiographical materials has been outlined, in combination with a common Iranian-based dating system that was used until the end of the Sasanian supremacy in the region. For the history of the Armenian language, peculiarities in the orthography have been revealed that can be taken to be indicative of the age of the – otherwise undated – palimpsests. The first results have been published in one handbook (on Caucasian Albania) and more than 30 articles; in addition, they have been made public in more than 50 presentations on conferences and workshops.
With the identification and analysis of thousands of hitherto unstudied palimpsest pages, the determination of a “Syro-Caucasian” layer shared by the three Caucasian traditions and the detection of orthographic and other features that are crucial for the dating of the written materials of the first millennium, the project has progressed far beyond the state of the art. Until the end of the project, we expect to consolidate these findings in form of a synthesis which will be published, alongside scholarly editions of the palimpsests, in one more handbook. In addition, we have initiated, in close cooperation with the eScriptorium platform (D. Stökl ben Ezra), the development of a first open-access system for the automatic transcription of Armenian and Georgian manuscripts and, in cooperation with the laboratories of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures and the University Libraries of Graz and Leipzig, the foundation of a scientific database of material features of Georgian and Armenian manuscripts (inks, writing supports, etc.). We expect these first steps to end up in a common endeavour to investigate the emergence and proliferation of Caucasian manuscripts in a global perspective.