Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations, Northeast Normal University
Changchun (Chine)
05.09.2025 – 07.09.2025

The XVIII Melammu Symposium on knowledge transfer between and across ancient empires will be held from 5 to 7 September at the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations, Northeast Normal University Changchun, China.

The communicative turn historical studies have seen in recent years has also reshaped the way we understand information flow and knowledge transfer. It is not anymore a simple sender-receiver-model that is applied to examine ancient sources, but a full acknowledgement of the complex dynamics of communication with all the accompanying, enabling, and limiting political, social, legal, economic, and religious-cultural frameworks that matters in transferring, that is, transmitting and receiving formal and tacit knowledge between persons and across times. In the XVIII Melammu Symposium, we aim at connecting the topic of knowledge transfer to the imperial framework. Papers from different ancient studies disciplines address questions of the languages, ways, forms, agents, possibilities, ideologies, limits etc. knowledge was transferred through, both between contemporaneous and across consecutive empires.

Programme :

5 September 2025 (morning): arrival & registration

5 September 2025 (afternoon): Opening & Keynote 1 & Sessions 1–2

14:30–16.00: Opening (incl. group photo) & Keynote 1
Jaewon Ahn (Seoul): Demosthenes Coreanus?
16:00–16.30: Tea break
16:30–18.00: Session 1: Literary Transmission
1.) Alexander Johannes Edmonds (Münster): From epic to romance: A new paradigm for literary transmission between East and West in the 1st millennium BC
2.) Sven Günther (Changchun): Xenophon framing knowledge transfer
3.) Giuseppe Giardi (San Marino): The Seres of Ammianus Marcellinus. The limits of knowledge: between choice and rhetoric

18:30: Dinner & visit of Guilin Road

6 September 2025 (morning): Sessions 2–3

8.30–10.00: Session 2: Technological Skills & Knowledge
4.) Marta Lorenzon, co-authored by Melis Uzdurum (Helsinki): Skill transfer and socio-environmental strategies in IA Assyria
5.) Seyed Abazar Shobairi (Athens): Interconnected approaches: irrigation, hydraulic systems, and cross-cultural dynamics in the Ancient Near East (first millennium BCE)
6.) Lin Lijuan (Beijing): The Graeco-Arabica knowledge transmitted into China in the Yuan Dynasty: Once again on the Islamic books and instruments in the Mishu Jianzhi
10.00-10.30: Tea break 
10.30–12.00: Session 3: Wherefrom?
7.) Li Yiqing, co-authored by Klaus Geus (Berlin): Where does the money come from? Taxes and duties in ancient South Arabia in comparison with other ancient cultures
8.) Elisabeth Günther (Heidelberg): Knowledge transfer from the provinces to the center? The motif of the cista mystica with snake in Roman sarcophagi
9.) Elizabeth Webster (Changchun): Knowledge transfer between and across ancient empires: Dunhuang case study

12.00: Lunch (Dining hall)

6 September 2025 (afternoon): Session 4 & Keynote 2

14.30–15.30: Session 4: Information flow
10.) Marco Ferrario (Trento / Augsburg): Imperial knowledge as knowledge of empire. Making Achaemenid Central Asia (ca. 1000–539 BCE)
11.) Hendrikus A. M. van Wijlick (Beijing): Espionage, royal informants, and stratagems: the flow of military intelligence in and between the Roman and Parthian empires during the late Republic

15.30–16.00: Tea break

16.00–17.00: Keynote 2
Angelos Chaniotis (Princeton): Res gestae: Transfer and translation of memory through the medium of inscriptions

18:00: Conference dinner
 
7 September 2025 (morning): Session 5 & Keynote 3

9.00–10.30: Session 5: Along the Silk Roads
12.) Li Qiang (Changchun): The role of paper in the transmission of knowledge: its impact on the Graeco-Arabic translation movement and the dissemination of Byzantine and Near Eastern knowledge
13.) Jordi Martin Pons (Barcelona): Manichaean expansion and Enochic traditions across Central Asia: From Qumran to Dunhuang (3rd–10th centuries CE)
14.) Bernhard Hollick (Oslo / Cologne): From Karakorum to Paris: encounters with Buddhism in the 13th century

11.00–12.00: Keynote 3
Hartmut Leppin (Frankfurt): Late antique law and the transimperial production of knowledge

12:15: Farewell lunch

7 September (afternoon): Excursion to Emperor’s Palace (optional)

Source : H-Soz-Kult