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Sharing Ancient Wisdoms: Exploring the Tradition of Greek and Arabic Wisdom Literatures
Posted: 14 September, 2026
Cultural Dynamics: Inheritance and Identity (2009 – 2012)
Sharing Ancient Wisdoms: Exploring the Tradition of Greek and Arabic Wisdom Literatures
The Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) is a collaborative partnership of 26 national research funding agencies from 25 European countries. In summer 2026, two AHRC interns, Princess Kunadu and Sammy Morgan, explored the long-term impact of UK involvement in HERA-funded research by contacting project leads to gather stories about what their research has achieved since completion. The team developed six responses into stories highlighting the lasting value of European collaboration.
Learn more about the process of collecting the stories
Credit: Leon Rafael, Shutterstock
For centuries, collections of sayings and practical advice collectively understood as Wisdom Literature shaped how people approached their everyday lives. The pathways through which these ideas travelled across languages, cultures and generations, however, remained poorly understood.
Led by UK based Professor Charlotte Roueché (King’s College London), Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) brought together researchers from the UK, Sweden, and Austria to explore the transmission of this literature between the medieval Greek, Arabic, and European worlds. The research demonstrated that many ideas often viewed as the product of a single culture were instead often the product of centuries of exchange between European, North African, and Middle Eastern communities. By tracing the movement of sayings and teachings through manuscripts and anthologies, the project highlighted deep historical connections linking Greek and Arabic intellectual traditions and showed how knowledge was continually reshaped as it crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries.
A major contribution of the project was translating these complex cultural relationships into accessible and innovative digital tools. Researchers created the SAWS Dynamic Library, which offered open access to a digital collection of wisdom literature, their source texts, and later works influenced by them. The platform enables users to explore connections between texts, ancient places, and ideas in ways that would previously have required years of specialist research. The project’s publication of previously obscure digitised manuscripts and textual collections drastically increased public usage of cultural heritage materials actively advancing the knowledge of the individuals across Europe.
The project also played an integral role in supporting future research into the relationship between texts and ideas across time and space through the development of a unique methodology and ontology. This academic approach has influenced further explorations of ancient text such as Elagina’s project on Beta maṣāḥǝft, focusing on the digital analysis of Ethiopic manuscript culture. The continued use of SAWS’ discoveries to inform more recent work demonstrates the projects lasting importance and enduring prominence in humanities research.
More than a decade after its completion, Sharing Ancient Wisdoms remains an important example of how humanities research can expose shared intellectual heritage. By demonstrating the way in which ideas travelled between Greek, Arabic, and European traditions the project effectively highlighted the long history of intercultural dialogue that has shaped societies across Europe and beyond. Its legacy continues to support research and public understanding of the powerful exchanges that connect and define cultures across time and place.
Professor Charlotte Roueché | King College London | [email protected]
Written by Sammy Morgan
