Humanities, Arts & Religion

Dr. Zsuzsanna Gulacsi may not be turning the art world upside down, but she has turned the study of illuminated manuscripts on its side …

Assistant Professor of Humanities, Arts, and Religion, Zsuzsanna Gulacsi, is looking at fragments of illuminated religious texts with a fresh eye. Gulacsi has studied the only 98 existing fragments of manuscripts belonging to an important ancient world religion, Manichaeism. Elements of medieval manuscript construction have been known for some time, as well as their stylistic origins in Western Asia. Until Gulacsi’s work, however, scholars were unsure about an important episode of pre-Islamic Central Asian book culture. Gulacsi focused her work on a well-defined corpus of fragments – mostly bits and pieces of papers torn from once exquisitely illuminated luxury religious books that have been largely ignored by previous scholarship –, and discovered that on all currently known surviving examples of this book art the writing and illustrations were oriented perpendicular to each other. Gulacsi was able to demonstrate that fragments were oriented within books by the direction of the text, and the illustrations are “sideways.” The accurate reconstruction of the 11 largest fragments revealed patterns in codex and scroll construction features, which Gulacsi was able to apply to the analysis on the additional 78, more fragmentary remains. Illustrations by NAU’s Bilby Research Center staff have greatly enhanced her ability to visually demonstrate her findings and thus reflect light to a forgotten world of illuminated manuscripts from medieval Central Asia.

Manichaeaism, an ancient Persian religion which included Saint Augustine (354-430 CE) among its most famous adherents, became the focus of persecution during the 4th – 10th centuries in the Mediterranean region and West Asia. Consequently, Manichaean art and books were systematically destroyed except in the Turfan region of Central Asia, along the ancient Silk Road (map). There a Central Asian people (the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs) supported the religion for about 300 years, during the 8th through the early 11th centuries CE. The oasis city of Khocho in the desert near Turfan was a fairly cosmopolitan place at that time, with representatives from far-flung regions, religions, and languages living together. After the demise of Kocho, the ruins of this adobe city has preserved the fragile remains of silk, parchment, and paper books and scrolls over the centuries until their recovery by German archeological expedition in the 1900s.

Read the Inside NAU article on professor Gulacsi.