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.
