Judy Kaplan (Science History Institute), "The Berlin Turfan Collection, Disciplinarity, and Scholarly Biography"
Between 1879 and 1935 a series of foreign expeditions to the Turfan depression in Xinjiang extracted an extraordinary volume of antiquities. This ancient Silk Road oasis attracted Swedish, Russian, Finnish, German, Japanese, British, and French explorers. That said, the four German expeditions (1902-1914) were, by all accounts, the most comprehensive. Facilitated from the start by Russian scholarly encouragement and material support, these led to the collection of some 40,000 text fragments, representing more than 20 different languages and writing systems, several of which had previously been unknown to Europeans. These works provided a new empirical foundation for research in Indo-European philology and comparative-historical linguistics after 1904. Stored in German salt mines during WWII, divided among institutions East and West thereafter, these materials are now being reintegrated and reanalyzed through a number of collaborative digitization projects. My goal in this informal talk will be to explore how the Berlin Turfan Collection relates to questions of disciplinary history and individual biography.
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