The Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports of the Republic of Armenia has significantly expanded its programs to support the teaching of the Armenian language and Armenian studies abroad with budget funding since 2019.
In the 2020-2021 academic year, instead of the previous four, the above-mentioned program was implemented with eight institutions in six countries, including the University of Salzburg. The director of the Center for the Study of the Christian East at the University of Salzburg, Austrian Armenologist, Doctor, Associate Professor Jasmine Dum-Tragut, has initiated two important research projects on Armenian cultural heritage.
The relatively short term (six months) is the project on ‘Armenian Linguistics in Karabakh’, which will study the history of the Armenian language in Artsakh, its changing functions in a multilingual society, until it becomes the official language of the Artsakh Republic, its prestige, language viability, the correlations between the Artsakh dialects and the literary Armenian.
The Research Fund of the University of Salzburg funds this project. The other interdisciplinary project, entitled ‘Horse body as a meeting place: Cultural exchanges, the transfer of knowledge between the Christian West and the Muslim East in the late medieval Armenian horse books’ has been approved internationally for four years, starting 2022, with a budget of more than half a million euros. The project envisages cooperation between Matenadaran (Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts), Yerevan State University, Frankfurt University (Germany), Vienna Veterinary University and Vestigia Manuscript Research Centre of Graz University (Austria), as well as with collections of manuscripts of London, Paris, Tbilisi, Cairo, and USA.
This project is based on a lost medieval Armenian manuscript on equine medicine, the existence of which is known only from the memory of another manuscript, as well as a 6-th century Armenian medical manuscript discovered in 2008. Starting with this completely unexplored medical manuscript, the project expands to include the transfer of knowledge from the Christian West to the Muslim East during the transition from the Middle Ages to the early Modern Ages. The acquisition of knowledge about horses by Armenians and its contribution to related cultures, thus to world equine medicine, will be possible for the first time to be thoroughly analyzed based on unstudied translations of Armenian horse books into Arabic and Georgian.
The above-mentioned Armenian manuscript was written in Cilicia (1298), then taken to Swas/Sebastia - Ottoman Empire (1504), Tbilisi - Georgian Kingdom (1791), Isfahan - Afsharid dynasty of Iran (19th century), finding its final resting place in Yerevan (2008). Its path is a unique opportunity to trace the path of tangible cultural heritage to the path of the late medieval Armenian manuscript, as well as to emphasize its role as an intangible cultural heritage of Armenia, a hitherto unknown source of medieval equine therapy.
This project brings together an unprecedented group of disciplines to study the medieval Armenian manuscript, which is important for both the humanities and the natural sciences.
Jasmine Dum-Tragut has formed a team of experts consisting mainly of Armenian-Arabic, Georgian-Armenian handwriting researchers, as well as Austrian-international collaborating consultants representing the fields of handwriting, medieval science, history of science, Caucasian and Iranian studies, and veterinary medicine.
Jasmine Dum-Tragut emphasized that she is inspired by this project, as it includes not only its two professions in one research project - the Armenologist-linguist-horse expert, but also its two great loves - Armenia and horses. Moreover, according to Jasmine Dum-Tragut, thanks to an Austrian ecumenical foundation, the Catholic Diocese of Salzburg, it was possible to set up a travel fund to Armenia for its doctoral students majoring in Armenology.
It will give students the opportunity to visit Armenia with Jasmine Dum-Tragut, work together and conduct field research.
