Congratulations to CCS Professor of Asian Studies and Art History Dr. Zsuzsanna Gulácsi on her recent invited presentation at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, on Oct. 17, 2023! Dr. Gulácsi’s presentation, “The Life Cycle of the Sacred: Manichaeans Artifacts and their Curious Preservation at Buddhist Archaeological Sites across Medieval East Central China,” focused on a unique body of text and art that was produced for the purposes of Manichaean communities between the mid 8th and early 11th centuries along the eastern part of the Silk Routes. In her talk, she assessed the codicological and pictorial qualities of some of the best-preserved Iranian, Uygur, and Chinese examples of the corpus known today from the Turfan region (Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region) and Dunhuang (Gansu Province, PRC), in order to contemplate the life of sacred objects, the practice of their sanctioned disposal, and their occasional Buddhist appropriation.
