Albeit based upon a distinct provenance collection of fragments, the project to edit and publish the ‘Schøyen’ collection of birch bark manuscripts shares identical research objectives, corpus proposition collaboration model and research outputs with the Senior Gāndhārī Manuscripts project.
The project to develop a corpus of inscriptions for the Upper Indus Valley commenced with a pilot of inscriptions sourced from rocks from Shatial on the Karakorum Highway in the Upper Kohistan district in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. More than a 1000 across 224 rocks have been catalogued including Kharoṣṭhī, Brāhmī and Sogdian inscriptions composed across the third to seventh centuries. In addition, approximately 700 petroglyphs have been catalogued. The development of a sophisticated corpus of inscriptions is a component of a wider program of 3D imaging of the rocks. The project stakeholders are Wilfrid Laurier University and Lahore University of Management Sciences.
This project objectives were to pilot the integration of a Sanskrit inscriptions corpus from Angkor, Cambodia (7th-13th century CE) with geographic information system GIS mapping from the Angkor Toponymic Atlas and with historical scholarship on the region and its inscriptions. Previously, multiple editions of these inscriptions were transliterated, catalogued and archived inconsistently, constraining any integrated analysis.
Relic inscriptions are highly formulaic and, located at the nexus of state and monastic hegemony, might be characterized as truly foundational artefacts. The focus of this project, which initiated requirements for READ and was the basis for the development of READ Workbench, was the characterization of the ritual practice of relic establishment through the detailed analysis of formulaic patterns in the content of reliquary inscriptions.
The objectives of this project are to aggregate a selection of inscription TextBases from across two language/scripts, Gāndhārī/Kharoṣṭhī and Epigraphical Hybrid Sanskrit (EHS)/Brāhmī composed in both the first and second century of the Kuṣāṇa period, into a collection. The collection encompasses a range of exemplars recording the donation of different types of religious objects. The project leverages existing TextBases developed in the Gandhāran relic inscriptions project and required development of EHS inscriptions.
The Kuthodaw Pagoda Project was established for the purpose of photographing, documenting and studying the Kuthodaw Pagoda site and its Pali language inscriptions. The project objectives were to pilot the digitization of the entire canon by on-boarding a select number of texts. Existing digital Roman-script transliteration of the 6th Council edition were edited to reflect the readings of the Kuthodaw Pagoda stelae by a team of monastic scholars from Sitagu International Buddhist Academy, Mandalay branch.
The ‘Senior’ collection of birch bark manuscripts originate from eastern Afghanistan or northern Pakistan date to the second century CE and contain discourses of the Buddha and biographical accounts of his life. The manuscripts are fragmentary and required extensive conservation and reconstruction. A number of the manuscripts have already been the subject of monographs and doctoral dissertations. In this truly multi-national undertaking, Senior manuscripts are being edited at three institutions (University of Washington, University of Sydney and the Australian National University) as well as by independent scholars across widely divergent time zones. Each of the research participants are peer stakeholders in the project.
