Speaker: Imre Galambos
Time: 6 pm CET 21, 28 October
Few places are as famous as the Dunhuang 敦煌 Cave manuscripts. Located in modern Gansu Province in the People’s Republic of China, Dunhuang was a central node of communication along the equally famous Silk Road.
A stunning discovery of manuscripts from a cave, then named Library Cave, occurred at the beginning of the 20th century by Taoist Wang Yuanlu 王圓籙. The cave was sealed around the 11th century CE. Wang almost immediately began to sell these texts to explorers such as Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot. The cave included all sorts of materials: Buddhist texts, social documents (such as contracts), local histories, texts about geography, copies of the Analects 論語, but also records of divination, mathematics, and recreational games.
The discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts has thus made an enormous impact on the development of the field of Sinology, providing an abundance of first-hand documents and opening up entirely new directions of research. Despite this impact, the materials have primarily been looked at for their textual content, with only a handful of scholars paying attention to the manuscripts’ significance as physical objects. In recent years, developments in printing and digital technology have had a positive effect on philology in that an increasing number of manuscripts are accessible as good (or even high) quality photographs. As a result, their non-textual characteristics are attracting more attention. Nevertheless, the methods and tools of examining the physical and visual properties of Chinese manuscripts are still in the process of being developed.
Prof. Imre Galambos is one of the experts in this field, with extensive knowledge of manuscripts from ancient China and orthography. His lectures will focus on the methods and tools used in the analysis of medieval Chinese manuscripts. Many of these are borrowed from other fields of research, which have had a longer history of dealing with materiality. During the lectures, we will learn how to approach a manuscript, which are the things that are meaningful, and which are the ones a researcher should look at first. We will see how the examination of a manuscript’s physical form can offer important insight into the use and function of the manuscript, which in turn can lead to a much better and more nuanced understanding of the text. More importantly, we will be able to connect specific instantiations of texts with real people and religious practices.
You can download Prof. Galambos’s 2020 book Dunhuang Manuscript Culture: End of the First Millennium here.