We have three new collections available to view on the Endangered Archives Programme website: a collection of Newārī medieval manuscripts from the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal; an archaeological photographic archive from Romania; and finally the archive of the Dominican Monastery of Santa Rosa, Santiago, Chile.

EAP790: The Melvin Seiden Award: Digital documentation of endangered medieval manuscripts in individual and Vihāra collections from various Newār settlements in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal

The main focus of this project was to digitise rare medieval Sanskrit manuscripts as well as rescue those threatened by the earthquake of 2015. Nepal is home to significant collections of Sanskrit as well as Hindu manuscripts, with the Newār people having contributed enormously to the development of literary culture in the country. In vernacular Newārī the manuscripts are called ‘Thyasaphu’ and are not merely handwritten texts, but an object of veneration and part of their religious lives. The Buddhist Vajracharyas and Shakyas, and Hindu Karmacharyas from the Newār communities, were directly concerned with manuscript writing, recitation and performing rituals. In spite of the manuscripts’ importance, few are aware of their literary heritage and little attention has been paid to preserve and disseminate the manuscripts despite their religious and historical significance. Newar families still own manuscripts but unfortunately, most of the precious manuscripts are left to decay and are often now in poor condition. An inability to read the scripts and/or language, or little knowledge of the subject matter, has restricted people from reading these medieval manuscripts.

The project team were able to digitise 21 separate collections consisting of 687 manuscripts. In total over 28,000 images were produced. These included religious manuscripts related to Buddhism and Hinduism, literary works, medical texts, records of events, and other secular texts. These are important records for Buddhist and Hindu Newārs to perform religious duties and also for scholars of Newār Buddhism, Vajrayana rituals, Hinduism, the Vajracharya priests and practitioners and others. Throughout the project, workshops and programmes were organised to train staff and local stakeholders, including those from the Newār community, to search, catalogue and digitise the manuscripts.

EAP790/1/1 - Puja Vidhi [17th century]

EAP790/1/82 - Mahalakshmi, Bagalamukhi and Sarva Sambhagyesvari Yantra [18th century]

EAP790/17/1 - Svasthani Vrata Katha [19th century]

EAP816: Selective digitisation and preservation of the photographic archive of the ‘Vasile Parvan’ Institute of Archaeology, Bucharest, Romania

The ‘Vasile Parvan’ Institute of Archaeology’s photography archive provides a unique source of information for archaeological research and monument recording and restoration between 1880 and 1925 in Romania. Large numbers of archaeological sites and monuments, then surviving across Romania, are represented in a vast array of excavation, exploration and restoration photographs, covering all periods from the earliest farming communities to the pre-industrial centuries of the last millennium. Many of the archaeological sites and landscapes represented in the photographs, along with a host of medieval churches and many villages, were totally destroyed during and after the two World Wars. The majority of the earliest material focuses on the Romanian Black Sea area, a region called Dobrogea, the richest region of Romania in terms of its archaeological heritage. It also used to be the most ethnically diverse region of Romania and until the end of World War I was one of the most rural and arid. Many of the photographs shed light on the ethnic diversity of the region, nowadays hugely different, and on the unaltered landscape of the area, much changed due to the huge communist agricultural programmes of the sixties and seventies, which included erasing to the ground entire villages along with their churches and traditional field systems. Archaeological artefacts – pottery, sculptures, metal objects – are also represented, along with other items of major historical importance: objects of religious art, paintings, sculptures and fabrics, many of them subsequently destroyed or lost, sometimes plundered by German, Russian or other troops during the wars that have affected Romania in the past 150 years. The on-site images include extremely beautiful local ethnographic photographs and rural landscape images depicting a world long gone, especially in the Black Sea area, populated by a wide mix of differing nationalities in the period before WWII.

EAp816/1/4 - Tropaeum Traiani

EAP816/1/2 - Pietroasa treasure

EAP821: Documentary heritage at risk: digitisation and enhancement of the archive of the Monastery of Dominican nuns of Santa Rosa, Santiago, Chile

This project catalogued and digitised the archive of the Dominican Monastery of Santa Rosa, one of the four oldest and most important archives of female writing of Chile. Founded in 1680 as a Beguine convent, it later became a monastery in 1754. The Dominican sisters of the monastery were characterised by their cultural and intellectual life which is reflected in the documents digitised as part of the archive. This is a unique set of documents as the testimonies of women from this period have been preserved in few other places in Chile. Among the files are valuable diaries and autobiographies such as that of Dolores Peña y Lillo, which highlights the features of regional and local female idiosyncrasies. These documents are a great resource for scholars and contribute to research, study and dissemination of the model of female education at that time, based on the intellectual culture, crafts and arts. The project team digitised 107 volumes in total consisting of over 27,000 images.

EAP821/1/1/1 - Life and Virtues of the Servant of God Father Ignacio García of the Society of Jesus, by Fr Francisco Javier Zevallos [17th century-19th century]

EAP821/1/1/71 - Prayers for the Rosary of the Holy Mass [19th century]

EAP821/1/1/87 - Maps and drawings related to the cloister and Church of the monastery Dominicans of Santa Rosa in Santiago [18th century]

Thursday, January 26^th, it’s my last day of exploration in the Infa Yattara Family Library (IYFL) and of enduring the now familiar route to its location in the newly built-up eastern outskirts of Bamako. The Yirmadjio district has become home to many Malians from Timbuktu who have sought refuge in the capital during the recent violence and instability that have disrupted the northern regions of the country.  My taxi awaits. I brace myself to inhale once more with the searing ambrosia of the Malian capital’s thoroughfares, a suffocating mix of dust, diesel exhaust and other particulates that rake the bronchial passages. The more pleasing concoction of minute inhalants still await at the library: a thin haze composed of nearly microscopic flecks of manuscript paper that are unavoidably created when folios are handled and the dry mold one brushes off a tooled leather binding. I find that it goes well with cola, others prefer the bottled water or a shot of sweet Malian tea.

Example of a manuscript from the IFYL collection. Note the powdery dry mold on the leather binding wrap

Madame Fati greets me at the door when I arrive, and Daniel, my apprentice who is learning the art of manuscript photography among other aspects of basic preservation, descends, two steps at a time, wearing his habitual wide grin and embraces me with his slender frame. We make our way back up from the residence’s courtyard, to the library proper, secured by not one, but two, steel gates, a reminder of the precious materials which this unassuming house conceals and the desire to protect them adequately.  Having gained access to the room in which steel cabinets house the roughly 4000 manuscripts, my entrance disturbs the dove nesting in the window facing the street below. That too, offers a certain symbolism, though I refrain from interpreting the omen presented by the tiny egg that went missing at one point during our month-long pilot project.
Dove's nest, egg still present

The libraries of Timbuktu, and the abundance of centuries-old manuscripts they contain, have consistently attracted the attention of international media during the past five years. That coverage, however, has not been devoted solely to stories of scholarly discoveries regarding one of West Africa’s most productive scholarly centers of the pre-colonial period.  Instead, accounts have largely focused on the threat to these troves of knowledge during the town’s occupation by the al-Qaeda linked militants of Ansar Dine which began in 2012. To be fair, much ink has also been devoted to the optimistic story of local Malian efforts, often with support from outside donors and experts, to secret away a large percentage of these endangered manuscripts to the safety of Bamako, where they remain today.

Like the manuscripts, the Yattara family was forced to flee their home in Timbuktu shortly after the militant occupation. Yet, despite open death threats – Pastor Yattara was specifically target because of his role as a prominent leader in the small, but vibrant, Christian community of the city – they managed to arrange the removal of much of their private manuscript library before their property was ransacked.  Like dozens of other families, whose collections can range from a few hundred to tens of thousands of works, their holdings received sanctuary in the Malian capital under the auspices SAVAMA, a local NGO dedicated to the protection, preservation and study of these material. Founded by a scholar-librarian of Timbuktu, Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara, and with the support of various private foundations and other international partners, the SAVAMA team has assumed responsibility as temporary caretakers of this fragile class of movable heritage.

Inside the Infa Yattara Family Library

In the case of the IYFL collection much of the material was rehoused in archival boxes and folders and a preliminary listing of the library’s holdings was created. At the family’s request, having themselves resigned to resettle indefinitely in Bamako, the collection was returned and relocated in their newly constructed residence that could both accommodate the library and facilitate further study of its contents. To my knowledge, they are the first of such family whose library to has gone through this complete cycle of relocation. Most continue to remain in SAVAMA’s care with their continuing efforts to stabilize and document those collections. Enter the EAP and its support for our pilot project whose goals have been to evaluate the continuing preservation needs of the collection, to provide training in the use of archival materials and photographic equipment which we supplied, to assess the strengths of the holdings for future scholarship, and to digitise a representative sample of the manuscripts for open access.

Dr. Straughn reviewing a manuscript with Pastor Yattara

An additional aim of the project has been to document the history of the collection in order to better contextualize how this new chapter in its biography marks both a continuation of its relationship to furthering knowledge, and the establishment of new forms of engagement with publics that could never have been imagined by those individuals who had initially put pen to paper.  The library has formed over the life of Pastor Yattara to include items inherited from his father, the namesake for the institution, and other family members. He, like many other library caretakers, has also acquired materials from outside the family, significantly broadening the scope of its holdings, particularly in the areas of the esoteric sciences. Indeed, this practice continues a long tradition for the circulation of texts amongst scholars and bibliophiles in the communities of northern Mali and even beyond. Such networks of acquisition have extended into Andalusia in the north, Egypt in the East, and Nigeria to the south. It is not uncommon to see a manuscript where a string of former owners’ names have been crossed out and another added. In our work we came across several examples of this reinscription scattered throughout the library’s holdings.

Pastor Yattara consulting with a colleague on the items to be digitised

In our daily work, the team inspected each of the manuscripts in the collection in order to document, and in many cases rectify, any issues with their current housing. We would also verify, and update where necessary, the initial data about their contents for the library’s local catalog (number of folios, condition, general subject matter). Through this survey of the holdings allowed we identified roughly a hundred manuscripts for consideration as potential items for digitisation. At this point the library director, in consultation with a local scholar, worked with us to select the fifty we would photograph in order to best represent the collection. This was not an effort to chose the fifty best or seemingly most important of the holdings, rather, our aim has been to demonstrate the range of the materials in terms of subject, condition, style, genre, date, as well as other vectors of their production. Our rationale for such an approach has been to showcase where the collection has its strengths – particularly in materials from the 19^th century – such that scholars might see the potential in conducting future work with the collection as a whole or in part.

   The digitisation process

On a personal note, my work with these venerable manuscripts, and the relationship that I came to have with them, reflected, in many ways, how I would experience and engage with the modern city that had become their new residence. It was a mix of the familiar and the strange, the exciting and monotonous. On any given day you might come across a series of folios filled with seemingly indecipherable magic squares with unimaginable powers. Such wonders might be followed on the return drive to the hotel with a glimpse of a man riding a motorbike with a kid (and here I mean a real baby goat) on his shoulders or a live chicken hanging on the handlebars of a mopped, wings flapping, as the driver weaves through the cars. The following day would be filled with page after page of texts on jurisprudence, often in a hand that was less than legible, even if it had not been extensively smudged by water staining and the dirt that could result from several decades of safekeeping as part of a cache of buried manuscripts. Such days might be similarly filled with endless traffic jams to rival Los Angeles or Cairo, motorists occupied with their ubiquitous mobile phones as they endeavor to inch forward. It is all valuable knowledge, whether ethnographic or epigraphic, regardless of its potential to be paradigm shifting or to supply another data point that confirms a well-established trend. My colleagues and I have been humbled by the opportunity to collect that knowledge and to have been entrusted by the Yattara family and the EAP as a conduit for its sharing. 

This blog has been written by Dr. Ian Straughn, Brown University. Dr. Straughn is the grant holder for the EAP913 pilot project.

Photography arrived in India in the 1840s with the first photographic society in South India being created in Madras in 1856. During the early decades of Indian photography, it was accessible almost exclusively to the colonial administration and Indian elite. However by the 1880s, commercial photography studios had found their way into the bazaars of the Presidency’s and family portraits started to appear inside Tamil households. Previously no local forms of popular portraiture existed aside from representations of the divinities.

Negative from the Nalla Pillai Studio, Kumbakonam

Tamil portrait photography, often facing restricted access to technological improvements, rapidly developed into a rich practice, where technical inventions, ingenious adaptions and artistic achievements rubbed shoulders. The early Tamil commercial studio photographers created their own visual language to represent south India selves and families. Their idioms combined the use of props, accessories, backdrops, over-painting, collage, and montage. Throughout the first half of the 20th century constraints imposed by high costs and difficulties in importing recent photographic equipment resulted in the prolonged use of older photographic equipment and processes by small family-run studios.

The advent of mechanised processing and printing of colour photography followed by the digital revolution radically transformed photographic practices and production. A very large number of studios closed down (with their archives often, but not always, lost) as they could not financially manage to acquire the expensive equipment necessary. The studios that did manage to survive these successive technological revolutions discarded manual processing and printing of black and white portraiture which had been their trade and skill for over a century (cf. Article in The Hindu, “In a Fading Light”, by A. Shripathi, 13/07/2015).

Discarded prints in a second hand shop

Over the last 25 years, the 'visual turn' in South Asian Studies, has afforded glimpses into numerous visual media produced in the Indian subcontinent over the last century and a half. Concerning the field of Indian photography, the vast majority of publications and archives concern colonial practices of photography and north or central Indian appropriations of the photographic media during the 20th century. The productions of South Indian studio photographers are largely unexplored and no archive exists to foster research on this vast and rich topic of study. The material digitised during the project will provide visual evidence of Tamil society at moments of crucial social and cultural changes.

Studio interior in Tirunelvelli

This major project will create the first archive of Tamil studio photography, namely family portraiture, from the time of the introduction of commercial photo studios in the second half of the 19th century up to the introduction of mechanised photographic processing. The project aims to cover the different productions of black and white manually processed studio photography (prints, negatives and glass plates) which are rapidly disappearing either through natural degradation or, in many cases, voluntary destruction. The feasibility of creating this archive was explored in the pilot project EAP737 through the survey of 100 studios in 14 localities.

The EAP946 archive aims to provide researchers with unique visual material and metadata of Tamil society at moments of crucial social and cultural changes. Besides the study of photographic processes and mediums throughout history, of the evolutions of representation of women and men, a wide range of issues could be investigated such as the consequences of the introduction of photo portraits in the homes; the ways in which these have affected vernacular notions of individuality and dual dimension of personhood (akam/interior and puram/exterior); their impact on representations of marriage from alliance to conjugality; the uses of family portraits as hybrid photo-objects subject to daily domestic ritual venerated alongside chromolithographs of divinities in Tamil households; the transformation of regional and sectarian dress codes etc.

Salem Studio archives

These unique photographic productions are severely endangered by chemical, climatic and human factors. Firstly, many of the earlier photographs produced by the commercial photo studios are showing signs of accelerated deterioration due to the chemical processes used for developing and printing during the first decades of photographic productions. This situation is aggravated by the tropical climate of southern India with its year round high level of humidity which is particularly detrimental to both prints and negatives. Secondly, large parts of photographic productions have been destroyed and continue to be destroyed due to a lack of awareness about the importance of preserving this heritage. During a century (1880-1980) of black and white photographic productions, many studios were regularly destroying their collections by selling negatives (glass and film) to silver-extractors. Similarly, families are discarding the portraits of the older generations by selling them to second-hand wood and glass dealers who dismantle the frame to recycle the materials. The photos (generally piled on the ground of the shop) are kept by these dealers for the occasional passer-by who can purchase these private portraits for a minimal price. Thirdly, the lack of awareness about the value of this unique heritage further results in the deterioration of the remaining photographic material in Tamil Nadu. Many of the earliest studios have closed over the last 30 years and the descendants of studio photographers often have minimal knowledge of preservation conditions for negatives and prints, nor an understanding for the value and vulnerability of their forefathers’ photographic productions. Besides the major objective of creating an archive of this endangered material, the project will also raise awareness and interest of the collection holders in order to preserve in the best possible conditions the remnants of this invaluable heritage.

Ramesh Kumar digitising images (EAP 737)

Private photo collections from photo studios will be the primary source for digitisation efforts. Researchers will be able to study the technical and ‘stylistic’ transformation of studio photography over the decades, and eventually, when compared to other studios in other places, the study of regional variations. The digitisation of each studio archives constitutes a corpus of its own that enables systematic image analysis to be done. The project will also aim to digitise photographic material from private homes which should provide interesting documentation on the photographic consumption of families. Digitising sessions will be conducted in 8 medium and large sized towns in Tamil Nadu: Kumbakonam, Karaikudi, Cuddalore, Pondicherry, Madurai, Chennai, Tirunelveli, and Coimbatore.

Coordinators Ramesh Kumar and Zoe Headley on a tea break (EAP 737)

Written by Zoé Headley, French Institute of Pondicherry. Zoé is the grant holder for the ongoing EAP946 major project along with Ramesh Kumar and Alexandra de Heering. Zoé and Ramesh conducted the pilot project EAP737. There are already some fantastic images online from the pilot project to check out. I've added a few below, and you can see more here. We're really looking forward to seeing what we receive for EAP946!

EAP737/4/4/31 - Studio Portrait Photo Prints [1955-1978]

EAP737/4/4/31 - Studio Portrait Photo Prints [1955-1978]

  EAP737/4/4/12 - Studio Portrait Negatives Box 12 [1960-1978]

EAP737/4/4/12 - Studio Portrait Negatives Box 12 [1960-1978]

 

To mark International Labour Day on Monday, I thought I would browse through two photographic collections where I knew there would be some great images of people at work. The first set of photographs is from Mongolia (EAP264). I could have picked so many, the themes range from working at the coalface, tanners, the clothing industry, shop assistants and perhaps my favourite which was taken inside a sausage factory. The second set was taken by Annemarie Heinrich (EAP755) and show people at work in Argentina. Here we have brick makers, greengrocers, sugar refinery workers, images of an abattoir and timber yard employees.

Both collections date roughly from the 1930s to the 1950s and are visually appealing, but it is clear that the work was physically demanding and often carried out in dangerous conditions. Do visit these collections for yourself and see what other gems you can discover.

EAP264/1/5/1 Ulaanbaatar’s power plant operation, auto mechanical shop as well as metal work

EAP264/1/5/6 early coal mining activities

EAP264/1/5/6 cheerful coal miners

  EAP264/1/5/2 Skin processing in Ulaanbaatar factory

EAP264/1/5/2 Timber processing in Ulaanbaatar

EAP264/1/5/4 Mongolian shop

EAP264/1/5/5 Sausage factory 

EAP755/1/1/32 Making bricks

EAP755/1/1/37 Selling squash

EAP755/1/1/108 Sugar refinery, Tucumán

EAP755/1/1/139 Timber workers

EAP755/1/1/139 Abattoir work

EAP755/1/1/139 Cargo carriers

 

 

 

Last month we put four new collections online: EAP833, a private family archive from Serbia with many First World War records; EAP626, records relating to the Sierra Leone Government Railway; EAP609, Malay language records from Sri Lanka; EAP613, Armenian maps, periodicals and newspapers.

EAP626: Tracking the past - the preservation of the railway archives of Sierra Leone

EAP626/1/2/6 - Photographs of the railway

The Sierra Leone Government Railway was built in 1893 and changed the nature of society, enabling the transport of passengers and goods between the interior and the Freetown colony and port.  At independence in 1961 the railway was well equipped and was a significant employer until its closure in 1975. Since this period much of the infrastructure and academic memory was lost, especially during the bloody civil war between 1991-2002. In 2005, shortly after the end of the civil war, the Sierra Leone government opened its National Railway Museum in Cline Town, a suburb of the capital Freetown, based around a collection of British built locomotives, carriages and wagons which had survived in the former railway workshops. A number of documents and images were found since the opening of the museum, and a significant amount of archival material was found inside some of the vehicles at the time when the museum was developed. However, the project team found that the vast majority of the railways’ records were destroyed in the 1970s following the closure of the network. Although there was less material than anticipated the significance far outweighs the quantity as this is the only material surviving in Sierra Leone that was generated by the railway itself. There are gate pass books, requisition slips for oil and two tally cards for drivers withdrawing oil, items which might be considered insignificant in a UK business archive, but these are the only source for names of railway drivers at this period and thus actually take on a greater significance in the context of the railway museum. There are also tickets, an instruction manual for the railway’s telegraphy system from 1946, and a few other forms, which show how the railway operated.

The majority of the records digitised come from the National Archives of Sierra Leone and include a series of files opened by the Colonial Secretary’s Office in 1929, and a small series of 19th century photographs. The 1929 files are particularly significant, as they suggest that a review of the railway was carried out, with renewal of track, attention paid to accommodation, some questions of pay and grading settled, and most significantly some services replaced by road bus, including the so-called ‘Mountain Railway’ which ran from Cotton Tree up to Hill Station. These experiments with bus services foreshadowed the closure of the network in the 1970s and its replacement by road transport. The records digitised will allow researchers to better understand the development of the railway and its impact on the history and development of the country.

EAP626/1/2/7 - Postcards

EAP833: Safeguarding the fragile collection of the private archive of the Lazić family

EAP833/1/1/73 - From the war days: 1912-1917 [1917]

This project aimed to digitise and preserve the valuable private archive and library collections owned by the Lazić family in Serbia who for six generations have collected important and rare material. Aleksandar Lazić (1846–1916) was the founder and the owner of the Library until 1910 when his son Luka Lazić (1876-1946) took over who enriched the collection with material documenting the Great War. He acquired much of the material in or around the battlefield and continued to purchase related material until his death in 1946. Along with his son and successor Milorad Lazić (1912–1977), he also accumulated a significant collection of law books, the majority of which were acquired between 1930-1950 and are crucial for theoretical and historical research of the Serbian state and law, and also help to document the changes in Serbian society. The collection has continued to be added to by subsequent members of the Lazić family who continue to care for this important archive.

Much of this material relating to the First World War is unique and not found in any other libraries or archives. The preservation of this material is essential as most was printed during the war and on foreign territory using low quality fragile paper and ink. The collection includes for example, Serbian newspapers printed in exile on Corfu and in Thessaloniki at the time of the First World War during the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Serbia.  There are also copies of the rare confidential journal ‘Pregled Listova’, published in Geneva for members of the Serbian government in exile, and used to provide updates about the latest news from Serbs, their allies and enemies.

EAP833/1/2/1/2 - The Serbian Fatherland: a monthly magazine for Serbian youth in exile [1917]

EAP609: Digitising Malay writing in Sri Lanka

EAP609/5/6 - Syair Faid al-Abad [1903]

This project encompasses a range of materials written in the Malay language in Sri Lanka from around the mid-19th century to the late 20th century. The history of the ‘Malay’ community in Sri Lanka goes back to the middle of the seventeenth century, following the foundation of Dutch rule in the island in 1640. The designation ‘Malay’ has been commonly used to refer to people from the Malay Archipelago and Peninsula who were exiled to Sri Lanka by the Dutch as political exiles and convicts, or recruited as soldiers to colonial armies, both Dutch and at a later stage, British. Many of those designated as Malay were of Javanese or east Indonesian ancestry, and the early exiles included members of diverse local elites. Despite the distance from the Indonesian-Malay world the Sri Lankan community maintained a flourishing literary culture, with works that closely resemble those produced in the Malay “heartlands” as well as local creations. It includes manuscripts, printed books, prayer booklets, wedding invitations, personal letters, family records, poems and songs. These diverse materials testify to the variety of ways in which Malay was, and is used in Sri Lanka. The majority of older materials are Islamic in nature, including theological manuals, poems in praise of the Prophet, and tales and histories written in the hikayat genre. These are written in gundul (Malay-Arabic script) and/or Romanised Malay. The collection also includes modern examples of Malay written in the Tamil and Sinhala script, as well as older materials in Arabic and Arabu-Tamil owned by Malay families, testifying to the linguistic and orthographic diversity of the community's writing practices. The collection attests to the social and cultural aspects of the community’s life and allows for an expansion of the definitions of the ‘Malay World,’ and provides an insight into local forms of Islam.

EAP609/30/4 - Jolong Bacaan [20th century]

EAP613: Digital preservation and cataloguing of early printed Armenian maps, periodicals and newspapers, and making them accessible online

EAP613/2/3/2 - Zurna [Զուռնա] [1906, 1909]

This collection was first made available a year ago though it has recently had a large amount of new material added and is worth sharing again. The newer material can be found in the Fonds EAP613/2 and includes additional printed books, newspapers, journals and maps.

The project digitised maps and periodicals held in the collections of The National Library of Armenia (NLA), the largest repository of printed Armenian materials in the world. The first Armenian printed book 'Urbatagirk’ (Venice 1512), the first printed periodical 'Azdarar' (Madras 1794), the first printed Bible in Armenian (Amsterdam, 1666) and the first printed map 'Hamatarats Ashkharhatsuyts' (Amsterdam 1695) are some of the treasures preserved in the NLA. However, the storage conditions of NLA’s collections are poor and the material fragile. The fluctuation of temperature, level of humidity and the pollution level in the stacks remain uncontrolled throughout the different seasons and has resulted in paper deterioration and fungal contamination.

The project digitised over 60,000 pages, mainly of Armenian newspapers and journals, but also a small collection of maps dating from the 17^th to 20^th centuries. The newspapers and journals cover some important dates in Armenian and Soviet history and include interesting front page imagery on the dates of the 20^th anniversary of the Russian revolution, and the death of Lenin, as just two examples.

EAP613/2/3/68/4 - Eritasard Hayastan [Երիտասարդ Հայաստան] [1906-1907]

EAP613/1/5/1/12/22 - Khorhrdayin Hayastan. No.1-75 [Խորհրդային Հայաստան] [1928]

EAP613/1/1 - Maps (1695-1800)

 

Related articles

Spiked fiddles from Mongolia

New images online - June 2015

New images online - July 2015

This is a guest blog written by Lukas Birk, grant holder for EAP898.

Last autumn I was able to digitise 4000 negatives from Bellay Photo Studio in downtown Yangon for EAP898. The images were taken by photographer Har Si Yone, primarily in the late 1960s and 70s. Bellay Studio was founded only a few years after General Ne Win seized power in Myanmar and subsequently introduced ‘the Burmese way of socialism’. The studio was frequented by many ethnically Chinese members of Yangon’s society, a community that suffered greatly under Ne Win’s political doctrines, many had to leave the country by the late 70s.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi speaking at the award ceremony of the Yangon Photo Festival

The exhibition Yangon Fashion 1979 curated for the Yangon Photo Festival is the first narrative from the many fascinating photographs taken at Bellay Studio. The exhibition sheds light onto a hidden part of Burmese society from the 1970s; private fashion photographs. Although wearing western clothes, miniskirts, or tight blouses was not forbidden, they were certainly not worn on Yangon’s streets, as the political atmosphere was much too conservative for such individual expression. The outfits were often inspired by Burmese movie stars, musicians, or illegally imported fashion magazines. Some tailors would also provide style catalogues for outfits only used during a photo shoot. The studio was an outlet for freedom of style and young people, who could afford it, would be seen there frequently. These photos were often exchanged with friends and dedications can be found on the back of many prints.

This year’s Yangon Photo Festival branched out from its usual location, the French Culture Institute, and was held in public. It is the first time that the government allowed an uncensored public display at Maha Bandula Park in downtown Yangon. Besides Yangon Fashion 1979, the festival showed revealing photo stories by young Burmese documentary photographers, as well as a series from the World Press Photo Foundation. The festival was opened by mayor U Maung Maung Soe and state counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi juried the festival’s photo competition. Thousands of people came to see the exhibition on the first weekend and the fashion photographs became the centre of interaction and selfie-taking. The exhibition inspired many conversations; after all, everybody has a sister, aunt, or mother that had had her photograph taken in similar fashion. It was the commonality of the images that brought people together. The son of the photographer, now the proprietor of Bellay Studio, Tun Tun Lay was very moved at the sight of his father’s work being shown in a historic light and enjoyed by a huge crowd in the park.

 Lukas Birk with Mayor U Maung Maung Soe and Yangon Photo Festival curator Christophe Loviny

To celebrate Nowruz, this guest blog has been written by Milad Jahangurfar, who is the grant holder for EAP888, a current project that hopes to find the few surviving Avestan manuscripts which have used the Persian alphabet.

 

The Avesta, the holy book of the Zoroastrians, has been written in the Avestan alphabet, which was created for this purpose probably during the Sassanid era (224-651 CE). It is usually believed that before developing the alphabet, the priests were responsible for oral transmission of the collection. However, the history of the script and the forms of transmission of the scripture are still open to debate.

Sett-i Pir/Mah Setti Pir temple, inside the Asadān castle. According to Zoroastrian legends and folklore, the castle dates back to the Sassanid era.

In the 19^th century, and perhaps even earlier, a new trend in writing down the Avesta was developed. Zoroastrian priests started using the Persian alphabet. This change was a solution to the problem of reading Avestan and Pahlavi (middle Persian) texts which had become difficult for both priests and the laity.

The three major Iranian provinces (Tehran, Yazd, Kerman) where the manuscripts are located.

Tehran, Yazd and Kerman are the three major provinces in Iran where the manuscripts are likely to be located. Once being the strongholds of Zoroastrianism in Iran, they are still where Zoroastrian communities are based. Yazd and Kerman are considered to be where the manuscripts originate. Even the volumes located in Tehran have been mostly composed and inscribed in these two provinces. The Zoroastrian families that moved to Tehran, particularly during the last few decades, brought with them such manuscripts, handed down through generations, brought to the capital. A few of them found their way to safekeeping such as the National Library, the Archives of Iran and the Library of Tehran University, whereas the rest of them are kept in poor conditions in private collections and sadly there is no specific record regarding their history of ownership or the exact date of composition and provenance.

Part of a prayer in the Khordeh Avesta.

The major part of the corpora consists of the Khordeh Avesta, which means ‘the Little Avesta’. The Khordeh Avesta is a collection of daily prayers to be performed during different ceremonies and rituals by both laypersons and by priests.

Milad Jahangirfar, sorting the files after digitising the manuscript.

Dr Farzaneh Goshtasb (a faculty member at the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran) working on a manuscript.

Mr Rostam, the keeper of the Sett-i Pir temple in Yazd, and Dr Goshtasb.

EAP would like to wish all of our Iranian colleagues a very happy New Year.

To mark International Women's Day I have spent an enjoyable few hours delving through some of the EAP digitised photography collections finding some images from the various different countries around the world in which we fund projects. Having found so many amazing images in the archives I'm hoping to make a fairly regular 'photo blog' to share some of them and hopefully encourage others to explore further the many thousands of photographs (as well as other material) that we host on our website. Below each image is a direct link to its page on our website where you will find many similar photographs on a whole range of different subjects. If you discover any gems, please let us know and we'll feature them in the next 'photo blog'.

EAP016/3/1 - Digitising the photographic archive of southern Siberian indigenous peoples

EAP054/1/4 - Archiving a Cameroonian photographic studio (Jacques Toussele photographs)

EAP264/1/8/6 - Photographic negatives from Mongolia (Images of nomads and their lifestyles)

EAP644/1/58 - Photographs from Maison Bonfils (1867-1910s), Beirut, Lebanon

EAP755/1/1/38 - Annemarie Heinrich photograph collection, South America

EAP001/1/1 - Photographs from Esfahan taken by Minas Patkerhanian Machertich, Iran

EAP016/4/1 - Digitising the photographic archive of southern Siberian indigenous peoples

EAP054/1/4 - Archiving a Cameroonian photographic studio (Jacques Toussele photographs)

EAP103/1/1/186 - Endangered ethnographic archive, Sofia, Bulgaria
EAP264/1/8/8 - Digitisation of rare photographic negatives from Mongolia

EAP737/4/3/8 - Preserving early Tamil studio photography

EAP755/1/1/86 - Annemarie Heinrich photograph collection (Mendoza, 1940s), South America
EAP054/1/167 - Archiving a Cameroonian photographic studio (Jacques Toussele photographs)
EAP165/2/21 - Maya K'iche' women, Guatemala

EAP166/2/1/3 - Leading Rana family members, Nepal

EAP755/1/1/29 - Annemarie Heinrich photograph collection, South America

EAP347 - Vanishing voices from the Uralic world (Sound recordings available to listen to on BL Sounds)

 Written by Robert Miles, EAP Cataloguer