wire - news in brief

What happens when we look at a late antique image? In what order does our gaze wander over the individual elements? Where does it linger? What bodily reactions do such images or early Christian narra

Norbert Nebes from the University of Jena and Prof. Mulugeta Feseha from the University of Addis Ababa (from left) are documenting archaeological sites in the "Ethiopian Heritage Digital Atlas" (EHDA).

Prehistoric site is currently being researched by archaeologists from Freie Universität Berlin In 2012, archaeologists from Freie Universität Berlin came across mysterious stones in the mountains of the South Caucasus. Known as vishaps ("dragon stones"), these large stelae are approximately five meters in height and are famously found in the high mountains of Armenia.

A new Indology project is focussing on a hitherto little-researched period of ancient Indian history: the time of the transition from Buddhism to Hinduism in the northwest of the country.

The Maya did not strive for individual glory. They achieved top sporting performances primarily to avert the wrath of the gods and the downfall of their culture.

  RWTH geologist Professor Klaus Reicherter is on the trail of a "lost earthquake" in southern Spain.

Researchers in Heidelberg and Mainz investigate the history of a historical network to combat faked artworks Art forgeries represented a challenge to the art world and its institutions long before the sensational case around Wolfgang Beltracchi.

The media is currently reporting on measures affecting university libraries due to books that may be contaminated with toxic arsenic compounds.

Magical texts from Egypt in Coptic script and language are the focus of a research project at the University of Würzburg. They are now being presented for the first time in a 600-page book. A team of scholars spent five years studying them: "magical" texts from Egypt that were written on papyrus, parchment, paper and shards of clay - so-called ostraca - and date from the period between the fourth and twelfth centuries AD.

How did local people get organized in the ancient world? This is the subject of a new research project at the University of Würzburg involving Theology, Philology and History. Did the citizens of Rome know associations? Did inhabitants of Jerusalem set up grassroots movements? Did the regular patrons of an Athenian pub discuss the latest political decision-making? The question how neighborhood people formed groups in order to assert themselves and to pursue shared interests is difficult to answer two thousand years later.

The Faculty of Arts and the Humanities at JMU is becoming even more interdisciplinary: The new centre for "Modern and Contemporary Studies" provides new opportunities for collaborative research and teaching. The aim of the new centre is to strengthen cross-faculty collaboration in the humanities and social sciences.

The number of relatives that an individual has is expected to decrease by more than 35 percent in the near future.

Researchers at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany have carried out the first comprehensive analysis of some 20 mummy fragments from collections in the University's archives and have presented their findings in "Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology".

Scholars want to decipher a Virgil commentary and develop a digital transcription tool A digital tool is planned to assist in deciphering stenographic notes in historical documents.