"Digital Advances on the Ancient Silk Road" (OFAI Lecture by Hannes Fellner)
Channel: Austrian Research Institute for AI (OFAI)
Date: 2023-06-06

Digital Advances on the Ancient Silk Road
Assoz. Prof. Mag. Hannes Fellner, MA, PhD, University of Vienna
10 May 2023

From the 2nd century CE on, communities and monasteries developed along the trade routes of the ancient Silk Road in and around the Tarim Basin in today’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. These were centres of writing, copying, translating, and transmitting texts similar to the monasteries in medieval Europe. The old Indo-European languages Sanskrit, Tocharian, and Saka written in a Central Asian variant of the Indian Brahmi script – Tarim Brahmi – were the major languages in use in the Tarim Basin in the first millennium CE. In contrast to the writing traditions in medieval Europe, the ones on this part of the Silk Road are not well understood, mainly due to the fragmentary status of texts. I this talk, I will address recent efforts of making these languages and the Tarim Brahmi script digitally accessible and operable for philological, palaeographic, and linguistic research in the framework of the FWF-START project “The characters that shaped the Silk Road – A database and digital palaeography of Tarim Brahmi”. In the project, the text witnesses are linked to their digital facsimiles on the character level using Transkribus. All data concerning the texts is combined in an XML database and published through a web application. This allows to determine which text was written by whom, when, where, and how in order to

* trace the evolution of Tarim Brahmi and its adaptation to the different languages
* reveal the relationship between script types, languages, and genres
* categorize countless text fragments that are so far unidentified (regarding language, provenance, date, genre etc.)
* potentially (re)combine scattered fragments belonging to the same manuscript leaf
* and, of course, to better understand literacy and writing culture in the Tarim Basin