Manuscript Research Articles

Catalogue of the 17th and 18th Century Manuscripts of Qäranǝyo Mädḫaneˁaläm Church, East Goğğam Diocese, North-west, Ethiopia

Catalogue of the 17th and 18th Century Manuscripts of Qäranǝyo Mädḫaneˁaläm Church, East Goğğam Diocese, North-west, Ethiopia

Blacksmith: Between history, culture, and economy

This research was aimed at describing the historical, cultural, and economic value of blacksmith activities. The research method used was a literature study (library research). Data collection techniques were carried out through collecting research results that had been carried out and published in reputable indexed journals, Google Scholar, etc. The research results showed that blacksmithing had historical value whose development varied in each region of the world. In Asia, especially Indonesia, the historical development of blacksmithing was estimated to have existed since the 7th century AD. This was based on findings on temple wall reliefs, inscriptions, and ancient manuscripts found as relics from the royal era. Meanwhile, the historical development of blacksmiths in Europe, Africa, and other Asian regions was quite diverse, having developed from 1150-1400 BC. The blacksmiths of Dokdak Village also had cultural values ​​that were very important to be passed on. This was based on data which showed that in blacksmithing activities there were cultural elements, namely the knowledge system, livelihood system, and equipment and technology systems used. Furthermore, Dokdak Village's blacksmith activities had economic value, because the carried-out activities could produce production goods that have economic value. Based on this, it is important to protect and maintain the livelihood of blacksmiths to pass on values ​​to the younger generation.

Introduction

The study of European music in the long eighteenth century has advanced rapidly since the publication in 2007 of Robert O. Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style, which not only consolidated the theory of stock patterns (or schemas) used in composition and im provisation during this period, but also highlighted the importance of contemporary solfeggio and partimento as ways of learning these patterns. In 2012, Giorgio Sanguinetti published The Art of Partimento, encouraging the revival of such techniques and enabling scholars and musicians to incorporate historical practice into curricula. Three years lat er, Peter van Tour's Counterpoint and Partimento provided the first in-depth study of the third phase of the traditional Italian apprenticeship by interpreting the surviving manu script counterpoint notebooks from the Neapolitan conservatories of the era. By 2018, Job Ijzerman was able to synthesize much of this knowledge into a new method of teaching music theory "inspired by old masters" in his Harmony, Counterpoint, Partimento. The year 2020 saw the publication of Gjerdingen's Child Composers in the Old Conservatories, which described in detail how orphans became elite musicians, and Nicholas Baragwanath's The Solfeggio Tradition, which shined further light on the first stage of training. Many other scholars have also made significant contributions to the field.

Cleansing Jewel: A Neural Spelling Correction Model Built On Google OCR-ed Tibetan Manuscripts

Scholars in the humanities heavily rely on ancient manuscripts to study history, religion, and socio-political structures of the past. Significant efforts have been devoted to digitizing these precious manuscripts using OCR technology. However, most manuscripts have been blemished over the centuries, making it unrealistic for OCR programs to accurately capture faded characters. This work presents the Transformer + Confidence Score mechanism architecture for post-processing Google’s Tibetan OCR-ed outputs. According to the Loss and Character Error Rate metrics, our Transformer + Confidence Score mechanism architecture proves superior to the Transformer, LSTM-to-LSTM, and GRU-to-GRU architectures. Our method can be adapted to any language dealing with post-processing OCR outputs.

Building more mathematico in Renaissance Venice

In the mid-fifteenth century, Venice inherited Cardinal Bessarione’s collection of ancient manuscripts, an exceptional legacy that contributed to the renewal of mathematical studies. This essay outlines the spread of mathematics in Venice in the early Renaissance, when scholars actively discussed Euclid and universal proportions. Based on this cultural context, the author briefly analyzes the role of polyhedra and an example of the application of proportions to architecture: the church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice. This church is an interesting and rare case of ‘declared’ application of proportions to architecture, since we have specific indications in Francesco Zorzi’s memorandum written in 1535.

Reappraisal of Traditional Persian Medicine in the Treatment of Epilepsy and Seizure

Reappraisal of Traditional Persian Medicine in the Treatment of Epilepsy and Seizure

Tracing the Evolution of Governance and Social Order from Ancient Manuscripts to Medieval Statecraft

Tracing the Evolution of Governance and Social Order from Ancient Manuscripts to Medieval Statecraft

Pope’s Scrapes and Ghosts

Abstract This essay describes a previously overlooked feature of Alexander Pope’s early poetic manuscripts: the erasure of words by scraping. It contextualizes this habit within Pope’s broader practice as a maker of manuscript books for circulation among friends and patrons, and recovers for the first time several previously unnoticed variants in major early poems.

Von … bis, from… to: The Arc of Anthony Vidler's Architecture

Abstract Architectural historians often manifest a strong design impulse in their writing. This essay traces the theoretical arc traversing Anthony Vidler's individual essays and book projects as the parabolic imprint of his historiographic design. Based on unpublished manuscripts of the architectural historian's preliminary book outlines, drafts, and reading notes on authors such as Émile Zola, Sigmund Freud, and Georges Bataille, the article follows the route from Vidler's early research on utopia, Claude Nicholas Ledoux, and ideas of the French Enlightenment to his later books on “the architectural uncanny” and modern spatial psychopathologies in “warped space,” foregrounding the continuity of Vidler's “historical project” from the Enlightenment to the histories of twentieth-century architectural modernism. The article closes with an overview of Vidler's two latest book projects (currently unpublished), “Architecture After the Rain,” an autobiographically driven reevaluation of architectural modernism in Britain after World War II, and “Second Best Utopia,” a compilation of essays on “Utopics” from Plato to Fredric Jameson that argues for the abiding relevance of utopian ideas in the present.

Певческие рукописи Антониево-Сийского монастыря как источник по истории Русского церковного пения XVII в. (нотация, редакции текста, певческие стили)

The Synodal Cantatory Collection of the State Historical Museum contains a complex of cantatory MSs from Antonievo-Siysky Monastery. Most of them date from the 17th century. This was the time when the Russian tradition of church singing was being actively transformed. At Antonievo-Siysky Monastery, these changes took place quite intensively, and the Siysky complex of MSs is a valuable source for the history of Russian church singing of the transitional period. All types of musical notation, known in the ancient Russian manuscript tradition of the 15th — 17th centuries, are found in Antonievo-Siysky cantatory MSs, including “double-signs” (Rus. двознаменники), as well as several pre-reform MSs with a naon edition, in which cinnabar marks of the same period as the main text are affi xed. The complex allows us to trace how the preferences of Siya’s scribes and singers in using a certain type of notation changed during the 16th — 18th centuries. According to the edition of the verbal text, Siysky MSs are divided into three groups, i.e. pre-reform, transitional, and post-reform. The variety of editions of the verbal text makes it possible to study the methods of Nikon’s editors of the Printing House (Rus. Печатный двор) and their monastic followers. The repertoire of chants found in Siysky MSs shows that Siya’s professional singers had excellent knowledge of both the cantatory heritage of the late 15th — 16th centuries and the achievements of their contemporaries from major centres of singing of that time.

Menurunnya Minat Tulisan Aksara Jawa di Lingkup Mahasiswa Sejarah Peradaban Islam UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya

The main symbol of Indonesian nationalism, especially the Javanese, is the Javanese script. As a result of using Latin as the main writing system, the Javanese script is slowly being adopted by society, especially the younger generation. Efforts to preserve the field of education through teaching at the university level are the mainstay, especially for students majoring in history who are even more involved in writing Javanese script. So we took research to focus on students of the history of Islamic civilization at UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya to become the main research subject. In this case, indeed many have begun to lose interest in writing Javanese script, which they feel learning is too monotonous and like now it is just like studying tombstones and ancient manuscripts. To overcome this problem, several information designs are needed that can be used as guidelines for writing Javanese literacy education. In collecting research data using observation and interview methods, as well as assisted by several sources of literature, strengthened by using data from questionnaire results.

Evangelisation of all Creation: An Analysis of the Neglected Target Group of Mark 16:15

It is a glaring fact that the environment has constantly been subjected to deforestation, air and atmospheric pollution, and many other related factors that threaten both human and animal life. Individuals, governments, churches, etc. have long identified the pressure on the ecology and have addressed it from different perspectives. This paper thus sought to address this environmental problem from a religious or Christian point of view. Since the paper involved the analysis of a text (Mark 16:15), text critical method was applied. This method studies and compares ancient manuscripts of texts like biblical passages to find out which texts were originally written by the author and can thus be proved authentic. It was found out in the analysis that though Mark 16:15 was not written by the original author of Mark’s gospel, the text laid bare the fact that Christians especially, must have a strong sense of responsibility towards nature. Enshrined in Jesus’s mandate to his disciples in Mark 16:15 is the Christian responsibility to care for created things. It appears, however, that in their evangelisation plans, Christians concentrate more on the salvation of human beings than the survival of the ecology which suffers from the handiworks of humans. Christians are, therefore, encouraged to value nature and take necessary measures to ensure its survival. This paper contributes to the debate on how sacred texts can positively influence humanity’s attitudes towards the ecosystem. It creates the awareness that nature is God’s greatest gift to humanity and must be properly cared for. Keywords: Evangelisation, Creation, Environmental Crisis, The Gospel of Mark

X-ray fluorescence analysis in the study of paintings – an overview

Energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence analysis (EDXRF) is an excellent method in investigations of cultural heritage treasures, including easel and wall paintings and illuminations in ancient manuscripts. As one of the few methods applicable for this purpose, it is non-destructive and non-invasive. It is often combined with other methods such as optical microscopy, visible light photography, UV fluorescence photography, infrared reflectography, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray radiography, Raman spectrometry and others. The complex layered structure and mixtures of pigments, especially on easel paintings, represent a challenging task from the point of view of analysis. However, without taking samples it is only possible to analyse the thin surface layer of the investigated object with a thickness of tens to a few hundreds of micrometres. Nevertheless, this is not too much a problem when analysing paintings and even more so in the analysis of illuminations in manuscripts. The paper has an overview character and aims to summarise the possibilities, advantages and problems of XRF in this area and to demonstrate them on selected examples of published works, which in some cases are devoted to the works of leading painters from various historical periods (Giotto di Bondone, Antonello da Messina, Raffaelo Sanzio, Antonio Allegri da Corregio, Anthonis van Dyck, Rembrandt van Rijn, Giorgio Marini, Pablo Picasso and others). This review includes also a brief mention of selected research carried out in our laboratory.

Towards Automated Chinese Ancient Character Restoration: A Diffusion-Based Method with a New Dataset

Automated Chinese ancient character restoration (ACACR) remains a challenging task due to its historical significance and aesthetic complexity. Existing methods are constrained by non-professional masks and even overfitting when training on small-scale datasets, which hinder their interdisciplinary application to traditional fields. In this paper, we are proud to introduce the Chinese Ancient Rubbing and Manuscript Character Dataset (ARMCD), which consists of 15,553 real-world ancient single-character images with 42 rubbings and manuscripts, covering the works of over 200 calligraphy artists spanning from 200 to 1,800 AD. We are also dedicated to providing professional synthetic masks by extracting localized erosion from real eroded images. Moreover, we propose DiffACR (Diffusion model for automated Chinese Ancient Character Restoration), a diffusion-based method for the ACACR task. Specifically, we regard the synthesis of eroded images as a special form of cold diffusion on uneroded ones and extract the prior mask directly from the eroded images. Our experiments demonstrate that our method comprehensively outperforms most existing methods on the proposed ARMCD. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/lhl322001/DiffACR.

A REVIEW ON TEXTUAL CRITICISM IN AYURVEDA

The improvisation of a text happens only through its text criticism. Every new edition of a text tries to rectify any mistakes in the previous edition. As the number of editions increases, the clarity and quality of the content advances. In the case of ancient manuscripts composed of an author and reproduced the same matter by scribes of different specialisations or disciplines, some scribes even copied without knowing any idea of the subject dealt with merely for payment. Hence, analysing the variants produced through copying should be considered with attention and should be critically edited to reach nearer to the original work. Their justification of the author can be done, and the proper knowledge of the book can be assured for the scholars and readers. Textual criticism is the only way to find the originality of a book written years ago.

V.A. Favorsky’s Theory of the Book and the Problem of Artistic Interpretation of Literary Content

The article is devoted to the actual problems of the theory of the book, created and largely practically implemented by V.A. Favorsky and his associates in the 1930s —1950s. This theory was based on the principle of perception of the book as a synthetic art, which is confirmed by the tradition of handwritten books, relevant to the era of printing. The main contradiction faced by those who largely follow the work of V.A. Favorsky remains the correlation of the aesthetic concept of the book with its literary content. There are many dark places in V.A. Favorsky’s theory connected with this problem. Different approaches to this problem, characteristic of such a complex, synthetic work as a book, are analyzed, including issues related to the psychology of creativity, with a deep study of literary material when working on a book. The ambiguous experience of V.A. Favorsky, associated with immersion in the material of the book, with the study of the cultural context of the work, is considered. The article also highlights the important problem for V.A. Favorsky of the perception of a literary text in connection with the ideology and historical context of various epochs.The theoretical legacy of V.A. Favorsky does not lose relevance in our time, when the art of books is in need of pioneering approaches related to electronic publications of various types, including on the basis of the principle of “relay race of arts”, developed by the director and art theorist S.V. Obraztsov. Taking into account the current state of book publishing and its prospects, an updated appeal to the legacy of V.A. is proposed. Favorsky, which would solve the task of creating books at a high artistic level, taking into account the educational and informative functions of the book, without contradictions with the literary content of the work.

Manuscript Copy of “The Jewish War” by Josephus Flavius “Rukaniskania” of Prince Dmitry Vasilievich Romodanovsky

The article is devoted to the study of a manuscript book of the middle of the 17th century, kept in the collection of E.E. Egorov in the Manuscripts Department of the Russian State Library and containing the text of the Slavonic translation of Josephus Flavius’ “The Jewish War”. This copy, which remained unaccounted for in the domestic historiography of the monument, is accompanied by additional articles, one of which, dating back to the “Tale of the Princes of Vladimir”, which remained unknown until now, is introduced into the scientific turnover. The owner of the book, judging by the entry in its margins, was Prince Dmitry Vasilyevich Romodanovsky, exiled in 1660 to the Solovetsky Monastery.On the basis of a review of manuscripts belonging to the family of D.V. Romodanovsky and a comparison with one written by him himself, it is proved that the prince also produced the manuscript of Egorov. It is assumed that it was written by D.V. Romodanovsky still at home, before his exile to the Solovetsky monastery. It was possible to read in ultraviolet rays the erased record on the protective sheet, which testifies to the fact that the manuscript was put up for sale in the 17th century. An attempt is made to find the antigraph of additional articles of the book, particularly in the libraries of the Solovetsky Monastery and the Romodanovskys. It is concluded that it is necessary to introduce the manuscript under study into a wide scientific circulation as an important historical source.

Challenges in the Pursuit of an Indigenous Psychology: A Self-Reflection

This paper describes a variety of challenges faced by the author in studying and promoting indigenous psychologies of the Indian intellectual and cultural traditions. It narrates specific instances which tried to present a variety of obstacles that discouraged the author from his pursuit. For example, when a colleague stated that indigenous psychology is nonsense insofar as science is universal, and like physics, it does not admit regional variations; teachers or colleagues expressed extreme dejection about research on Yoga; he was advised against studying Indian psychology as it would ruin career prospects; his articles or book manuscripts were routinely rejected, and so on. In a specific situation, when a young colleague was hounded out of the department for his association with a school of theology, an example was set indicating that the religious association of Yoga would be dangerous. An autobiographical account is chosen over a survey or abstract analysis since academic pursuit must be sustained despite specific sorts of personal experiences that tend to undermine study and pursuit of indigenous psychologies. On the other hand, support offered by opposite types of experiences and by encouragement by mentors is also described.

Interaction between the big adventure form and the composition of a neo-romantic literature

The subject of the study is the composition of a neo-romantic story, the object is the stories by Alexander Grin «The Headless Horseman (18th Century Manuscript)», «The Taboo», «Hundred miles along the river». The author examines such aspects as the neo-romantic compositional features of the small genre, which probably emerged as a result of appealing to adventure novels, and attempts to correlate the concepts of «neo-romantic literature» and «adventure literature». Grin’s short stories, describing one event, are typically divided into chapters. This contradicts the genre logic, since it slows down the pace of the narrative. Allusions to the adventure attributes cement the composition and imagery system of the neo-romantic story and adventure novel. The affinity of poetics makes it possible to project the theory of adventure composition onto the neo-romantic work. It allows systematizing the neo-romantic composition features. The analysis draw the following conclusions. Division short stories into chapters seems to be an allusion to the adventure novel, for which is a way of structuring a large number of events. Allusiveness and play with points of view reflect the principle of dialogicity. The reader’s perception of allusions to adventure works performs a genre-forming function for an adventure novel, placing it in the context of adventure literature. In a neo-romantic story, allusions open up the dialog and play with readers’ expectations and non-neo-romantic poetics. The principle of play is innate in adventure as a phenomenon: events are lived through by the protagonist for their own sake. Although the techniques are common, the goals of a neo-romantic story and an adventure novel differ. A neo-romantic story deals with the personality behind its usual reality, not extreme situations as such, and a single event is sufficient to achieve this goal.

The Urgency of Digitizing Ancient Indonesian Manuscripts in Libraries: A Literature Review

The Urgency of Digitizing Ancient Indonesian Manuscripts in Libraries: A Literature Review