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Weaving Together What Belongs Together: Combining KMIS and CEToM

  • Hannes A. FELLNER (University of Vienna) ;
  • Erik RADISCH (Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig)
  • Published : 2025.12.31
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Abstract

The Kingdom of Kucha, situated in the Tarim Basin of present-day Xinjiang, was one of the most dynamic cultural centers of the first millennium CE. At the intersection of Indian, Iranian, Chinese, and steppe worlds, it became a major hub of cultural transmission. Its legacy survives in two vast yet fragmentary corpora: thousands of manuscript fragments in local languages such as Tocharian and hundreds of mural paintings from its cave monasteries. While both have been intensively studied, philological and art-historical research have long proceeded in disciplinary isolation, leaving fundamental questions about their interrelations unresolved. This paper presents a multimodal digital-humanities approach that integrates these corpora within a shared semantic and analytical framework. Building on the Comprehensive Edition of Tocharian Manuscripts (CEToM) and the Kucha Murals Information System (KMIS), we align textual and visual data through SKOS-based ontologies, cross-referenced metadata, and other techniques of digital humanities. By linking philological with art historical evidence, the project refines and reconstructs the material and conceptual worlds they express. Case studies on Buddhist narratives and material culture demonstrate how the integration of text and image reveals local adaptations of Buddhist traditions and enhances the semantic analysis of linguistic and artistic vocabulary. Beyond Kucha, the approach models how fragmented multimodal corpora can be reassembled through digital infrastructures, offering new methodological paradigms for philology and linguistics, art history, and the broader study of the transmission of Buddhism along the Silk Road.

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