The Materialities of Ancient Texts workshop is supported by a [research cooperation grant](https://www.nyu.edu/faculty/faculty-in-the-global-network/scholarly-opportunities/LMU-NYU-Research-Cooperation.html) based on a joint program between New York University and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). The grant will support two activities: an exchange of junior researchers between ISAW and LMU; and a workshop at ISAW on April 30–May 1, 2026.

Materiality may seem at first glance to be a self-evident concept, but there are significant differences in the ways in which it is theorized, invoked, and employed by those who study textual objects from fields that privilege language (e.g., epigraphy, papyrology, Assyriology, Egyptology, and history) and by those who approach such objects from the perspectives of material or visual culture (e.g., archaeologists and art historians; see, e.g., Knappett 2012; 2014).

Scholars from those fields that study texts in the first instance have embraced the “material turn” over the past twenty-five years by engaging in what has recently been called an “extended hermeneutics.” They self-consciously depart from the practice of the past century, when texts were often published with little to no information about (much less analysis of) the media or objects which carried them, by studying and integrating observations about the practices and affordances associated with the production, use, circulation, and preservation of textual objects, their embeddedness in networks of human and non-human actants, and their evolving transformations, recontextualizations, and reception over time. A basic assumption of this approach is that the “meaning” of a text is not fixed but emergent; and further that its materiality is necessarily constitutive of that meaning, often in ways that support or overlap with the semantic content of the text, but also in ways that may sometimes ignore or even negate it. (See, e.g., Dietrich et al. 2023; 2024 on the work of Heidelberg’s recent “Materiale Textkulturen” project).That said, materiality in this view almost always remains instrumental to semantic interpretation: the text is the point of departure and final object of analysis.

For those whose point of departure is material culture, dealing with materiality necessarily involves wrestling with the complex entanglement of humans with things, things with humans, and things with other things (Hodder 2011). The study of the materiality of a text-bearing object from the archaeological or art historical perspective answers the question, “how does this object qua object participate in the entangled materiality of the community in which it is embedded, which community certainly includes non-readers and other objects?” In this vein, for instance, Whitley (2017) observes that inscriptions are things before they are words and argues on the basis of archaeological evidence that “alphabetic literacy in the Archaic Mediterranean was, first and foremost, a material practice,” not the result of a cognitive and cultural shift entirely contained in the linguistic sphere from orality to literacy.

We live in a world of varied and sometimes contested materialities on multiple levels, a realization readily provoked by the inherent complexity of textual objects. This workshop is devoted both to the exploration of particular materialities of ancient texts and to the dialogue between different understandings and orientations to materiality as a lens through which to study ancient textual objects. We welcome case studies in extended hermeneutics and those adopting a material culture orientation to textual objects. We hope not only to provide a space to work with any definition, application, or operationalization of materiality, but also a forum for productive discussion about the commensurability of the various approaches to and aims of whatever theory or method of materiality participants may advance over the course of the workshop.

Bibliography

Dietrich, N., L. Lieb, and N. Schneidereit. (2024). Theory and Classification of Material Text Cultures: Concluding Volume of the CRC 933. MTK 46.2. Berlin. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111325514

Dietrich, N., L. Lieb, and N. Schneidereit. (2023). Theorie und Systematik materialer Textkulturen: Abschlussband des SFB 933. MTK 46.1. Berlin. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111292229

Hodder, I. (2011). “Human-thing entanglement: towards an integrated archaeological perspective.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17: 154-177. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01674.x

Knappett, C. (2014). “Materiality in Archaeological Theory.” In C. Smith, ed. Encyclopaedia of Global Archaeology. 4700–4708. New York.

Knappett, C. (2012). “Materiality.” In I. Hodder, ed. Archaeological Theory Today. 4700–4708. New York.

Whitley, J. (2017). “The Material Entanglements of Writing Things Down.” In L. Nevett, ed. Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece: Manipulating Material Culture. 71–103. Ann Arbor.