The project centers on »paper squeezes«: three-dimensional, paper copies of historic stone inscriptions, enabling their epigraphic study independent of place. Western European Semitic philology in the long 19th century relied on squeezes as evidentiary objects. They provided a geographically distanced basis for studying the histories of Semitic languages and of the populations that used them. A wide variety of actors were involved in the production of squeezes during research expeditions to the Near East. The project explores the scientific and sociopolitical alliances between them and asks about their constitutive role for the emergence of the paper replicas. It inquires into ever-shifting constellations of interests that Western travelers used and established to produce squeezes as resources of knowledge. Through these relationships, it shows how local and non-local hegemonic practices of domination and various non-hegemonic strategies are intertwined with the emergence of knowledge.