Since the 1st of February 2024, our weekly meetings with the team of project interns have resumed, with some progress in several aspects: the translation of 6th century texts, the project mindmap and the development of an ontology for Chinese calligraphy/epigraphy and rubbings adapted to our case, and the planning of our next public event: an exhibition and conference in October 2024.

In the last month, the team of interns has met several times to build an arborescent mindmap of the “Epiverse”, which was then commented upon and revised by Manuel and Lia, with major questions revolving around:

• the definition of a typology of landmarks (also tentatively called “spatial entities” or “conglomerate artefacts”, the latter being borrowed from the ERC DHARMA structure presented by Adeline) : these should provide a middle scale between the mountain and the writing support (such as moveable stele or unmoveable cliff), and should respond to the terminology found in the 6th century inscriptions, later sources (such as gazetteers) and scholarship on spatial analysis and the perception of the landscape.
• historical geography: how refined should our description of the sites through time be? Can it be a prose text with relevant links, or should it form a searchable basis from which most of our maps will be derived anyway?
• the materiality of inscriptions : while most of the fields identified here correspond to the model adopted by the Stonesutras project or recent research on Chinese epigraphy, defining a typology of writing supports proves quite challenging. Aspects of what Adeline had called “la mise en pierre” or the inscriptions’ layout on stone, first level of formal analysis in a calligraphic work, also require a flexible set of descriptors.
• the description of rubbings: beyond the information related to the acquisition and ownership or rights to access the documents, where we wish to provide the profile of related collectors or institutions when relevant/available, points that remain to clarify are the description of inking (how should we integrate traditional terminology here?), and of the “add-ons”: colophons and seals.

In this process, an encounter with the Callfront team, an ANR-funded project focusing on atypical Arabic calligraphy, has proved extremely useful in opening our minds to the dimensions that can be taken into account when describing calligraphic shapes in all their diversity. Approaching “calligraphy as image” is in fact an approach that has been initiated in the 19th-early 20th century Stele School essayists, but this modern pictorial turn has mainly relied on loose comparison between reference models and the practice of copying, rather than visual and material analysis with precise descriptors. In a Chinese context, the question would be: how do we conciliate this antiquarian and modern eye in a set of “neutral” descriptors?

This month, we were also glad to have the guidance of Dr. Zhang Rui, specialized in medieval litterature and currently postdoc at the BnF researching the Curtis collection, to start translating the Tianzhushan inscription by Zheng Shuzu’s. Our team also started working on the stele/epitaph dedicated by Zheng Daozhao to his father. Rui gave us her impression on the song 頌 genre, a stable form of poetry in tetrasyllabic verses appreciated for its “archaic” taste and favoured by Zheng Daozhao and his son.

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