This month we have had four projects go online. The first photographed temple murals in Tamil Nadu (EAP692). This is the first time that EAP has funded a project to preserve architectural art.  These exquisite paintings were vulnerable for a variety of reasons, including the recent use of sand-blasting in temples. The pilot project digitised murals at five sites, four of which are Hindu: Alagarkovil Kallagar Temple (with art dating from the 17^th Century);  Madurai Meenakshi Sundareswara temple (16^th Century murals); Narasingampatti - Chitrachavadi  and Adiyamankottai, Chenraya Perumal temple (all 17^th Century). The last location is a Jain complex at Tirumalai.

These paintings come from the east ceiling of the Alagar kovil Kallalagar Inner Mandapa and depict the continuous narration of the Ramayana.

EAP692/1/1/2 Alagar kovil Kallalagar Inner Mandapa Ceiling East [17th Century]

EAP692/1/1/2 Alagar kovil Kallalagar Inner Mandapa Ceiling East [17th Century]

The next two images come from cave 1 at Tirumalai and probably date between the 15^th and 17^th centuries.

EAP692/5/2 Tirumalai Jain Cave. Room 1 [16th Century]

EAP692/5/2 Tirumalai Jain Cave. Room 1 [16th Century]

The second project to go online was EAP759, a pilot project that digitised manuscripts from Sundarban Anchalik Sangrahashala, a regional museum housed in an abandoned part of Jadunath Nandi Hospital, in the South 24 Parganas District of West Bengal, India.

This illustration from EAP759 shows a page from another Hindu epic, this time the Mahābhārata.

EAP759/1/2 Mahabharata [19th century]

Madagascar was the location for the next project (EAP856), with the digitisation of archives of the nineteenth-century prime minister, Rainilaiarivony (1864-1895). The journals are written in Malagasy using Latin script that was introduced in 1823. The archives have been inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register since 2009. They have never been systematically studied and now that this invaluable resource is online, it will be of huge benefit to researchers.

EAP856/1/1 Photo Album D

EAP856/1/2  Journal du Premier Ministre Rainilaiarivony - Relations de diverses affaires traitée par le Premier Ministre [1866]

 EAP698 was the last project to be made available this month, a major grant that digitised Cham manuscripts. An important cultural group within Vietnam, the Cham once had their own kingdom called Champa, which lasted from the 7th century to 1832. There are about 162,000 Cham people living in Vietnam today, concentrated in Central Vietnam and the Mekong Delta region.

The project digitised manuscripts from 25 private collections and below is a taste of what the manuscripts contain.

EAP698/15/6 Cham manuscripts collected by Ms. Dong Thi Hang, No.06

EAP698/1/11 Cham manuscripts collected by Mr. Sam Van Tanh, No.11 [Latter half of 20th century]"

I am sure we will have some more interesting projects to share next month, but if you can’t wait until the next blog to hear our latest news, do join our Facebook group.

To celebrate West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song, the current exhibition that is on at the British Library, we are excited to have guest posts by some of the grant-holders that have carried out EAP projects in the region and we look forward to posting them in the next few months. Our first contributor is Dr Anneke Breedveld who talks about her project to digitise important Fulfulde ajami manuscripts from Nigeria, one of the poems from this project appears in the exhibition.

In 1997 Abubakar Bashir, the custodian of some 700 handwritten poems composed more than 200 years ago by the famous Nigerian Muslim leader Usman dan Fodio and his contemporaries, crossed almost 900 kilometers of rough terrain from Yola in Nigeria to Nkambe in Cameroon, to track down a linguist who could help him document his important inheritance. Covered in dust and bruised from being bounced about for four days in public transport, he arrived in Nkambe where he found me. Somehow he knew that I had written my PhD thesis on Fulfulde, the language in which the poems were composed and thought that I was the expert he was looking for. I couldn’t agree less, but Bashir insisted on showing me copies of some of the poems he had brought with him and explained to me their provenance, their contemporary use and historical importance. The significant involvement of women instantly caught my attention.

Bashir had inherited the poems from his mother and they were passed down to her by generations of men and women, all the way back to the 1790s when Usman dan Fodio and fellow jihadists, including his daughter Nana Usmanu, found the time to sit down and write beautiful poetry in their mother tongue, Fulfulde. These poems are a living history, as they are still recited by men and women alike at festive occasions such as Mawlid, the celebration of the birth of the prophet Mohammed. The original poems are written in Arabic script and some are in a very bad condition due to centuries of folding and unfolding. Bashir looked for advice and help to safeguard these texts for the future by transcribing, translating and archiving them properly. He returned home with a list of questions we thought should be answered in order to understand the poems. 

EAP387/1/3/10 First page of the poem  entitled "Yimre yeyraa'be" by Moodibbo Raaji , a friend (and later also critic) of Usman dan Fodio. It shows a page skilfully sown together, showing the care and respect that owners had for the texts.

Years later in 2009, Bashir invited me to London. Apparently I was not the only authority he had turned to for help and he had managed to get sponsoring from the Emir of Sokoto to fund my costs, including a laptop and a mobile phone so that we could stay in touch. Bashir had managed to produce transliterations into roman script of all the Fulfulde poems in his possession, which made it so much easier for me to understand (or at least to read) them. Like his mother, he would also recite the poems at special occasions and we made some recordings of the poems. And since in Fulfulde “to recite poetry” is synonymous with “to sing”, these are impressive recordings. London was also the place where the seed was planted for EAP387, a major project for digital preservation of the 1500 pages of Fulfulde poetry. In 2011 I went to Nigeria to digitise the documents at the University of Mubi.

The documents of EAP387 are now accessible for people to study. The translation of the texts is an ongoing process, as the documents show that Fulfulde has changed considerably over 200 years. My knowledge of different dialects and morphology helps to put forward possible translations to the native speakers without whom translation would not be possible.

Safeguarding the digital records in EAP387 is only the beginning of transferring the knowledge contained in it to future generations. Wouldn’t it be great if the recordings of the recitals of the poems, Latin transcriptions of Fulfulde and translations into Hausa and English would be added to the digital records of EAP387 in a multi-modal document? Thus the poems would truly become a rich source for the study of West African history.

Dr Anneke Breedveld, Tilburg University 

Grant-holder for EAP387: Safeguarding Fulfulde ajami manuscripts of  Nigerian Jihad poetry by Usman dan Fodio (1754-1817) and contemporaries

 

In February, the Endangered Archives Programme celebrated its tenth anniversary and the various press releases and newspaper articles all quoted that we had 4 million images online. It is hard to believe that today we reached the milestone of 5 million images.

I thought I would use this opportunity to reflect on some of the projects that have gone online since the beginning of the year – doing a ‘round the world’ selection.

One of the first projects to be made available this year was EAP164, which consisted of people's memoirs and diaries from rural societies along the Ukrainian Steppe. As well as paper archives, there is a wonderful selection of photographs giving a real sense of community, as this picnic illustrates.

  EAP164/1/2/3 Album of photos of representatives of a family - Perovskyh [1891-1990]

From the Africa collections, we put EAP286 online, a project from Ethiopia that digitised both Muslim and Christian manuscripts. A substantial part of the collection consists of Asmat prayers,  and this is an example of part of a 19^th century scroll.

 

EAP286/1/1/38 Asmat Prayers [19th century]

To show the variety of the collection, this is the first page of an incomplete Taḫmīs al-Fayyūmī on the "Poem of the Mantle" by al-Būṣīrī.

 

EAP286/1/1/489 Uncomplete Taḫmīs al-Fayyūmī on the "Poem of the Mantle" by al-Būṣīrī, The Unwān
al-šarīf ("The Token of the Noble") on the birth of the Prophet [18th century]

EAP566 is an example of one of the Asian projects that went online, a very impressive collection of 18^th and 19^th century Urdu periodicals. The articles cover an incredibly broad range of subject matter and the accompanying illustrations are a joy to browse through, as can be seen from these pages from Nairang-i khiyal.

 

EAP566/1/4/10/1 Nairang-i_khiyal (Volume and Issue not known) [1932]

 

EAP566/1/4/10/1 Nairang-i_khiyal (Volume and Issue not known) [1932]

My final continent from the EAP worldwide whistle-stop tour, of course, is the Americas and one important project that went online was EAP563 – the archives of the engineering firm ‘Hume Brothers’ which was set up in Argentina in 1880. The company's main work consisted of planning and building thousands of kilometers of roads, not only in Argentina but also throughout Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. It is a project that contains a mixture of texts, drawings and photographs.

This is a photograph of the construction of a lift bridge over the Riachuelo in Buenos Aires.

 

EAP563/1/5/4/3 Construction of a lift bridge over the Riachuelo in Buenos. Aires. It belonged to Ferrocarril Sud ( F.C.S.) [Early 20th century]

And this example is a stereoscopic view of the San Roque Dam in Argentina.

 

EAP563/1/5/5/1252 San Roque Dam (Argentina). [c 1945]

But of course I must not leave out the two projects that went online this month and got us to 5 million images. The first was EAP753, a pilot project that carried out an inventory and sample digitisation of parish documents in the area of Belém do Pará, Brazil.

EAP753/1/1/4 Cairary Baptisms, n 4 [1895-1901]

and EAP541, which digitised the historical archives in the Public Records and Archives Administration (PRAAD) in Tamale, Northern Ghana. I rather liked the fact that we have records about latrines - this has to be a first for EAP!

  EAP541/1/1/88: Salaga-Site for septic Tank Laterines [1952-73]

Do you know of any collections that merit preservation? The Endangered Archives Programme is now accepting grant applications for the next annual funding round – the deadline for submission of preliminary applications is 6 November 2015 and full details of the application procedures and documentation are available on the EAP website.

The Bolama collection, Guinea-Bissau

The Endangered Archives Programme has been running at the British Library since 2004 through funding by Arcadia, with the aim of preserving rare vulnerable archival material around the world. This aim is achieved through the award of grants to relocate the material to a safe local archival home where possible, to digitise the material, and to deposit copies with local archival partners and with the British Library. These digital collections are then available for researchers to access freely through the British Library website or by visiting the local archives. The digital collections from 144 projects are currently available online, nearly 5 million images.

EAP254/1/39: "Gädlä Täklä Haymanot "The Acts of Täklä Haymanot" [19th century]

The Programme has helped to preserve manuscripts, rare printed books, newspapers and periodicals, audio and audio-visual materials, photographs and even rock inscriptions. Since 2004 approximately 270 projects have been funded, ranging from rare books in Armenia to Cham manuscripts in Vietnam.

EAP531: Preserving the endangered manuscripts of the Cham people in Vietnam 

One of the most popular collections is photographs from the Maison Bonfils, depicting scenery and portraits from across the Middle East during the period 1867-1910. The Bonfils family established the first photographic studio in Beirut in 1867, with Lydie Bonfils the first professional woman photographer of the region.

EAP644/1/9 Outside Jaffa gate, Jerusalem c 1867-c 1914 - Maison Bonfils

In February 2015, Endangered Archives celebrated its 10^th anniversary with a selection of articles written by past and present grantholders in the open access publication: ‘From Dust to Digital’. Browse some of these fascinating and very different articles for an insight into just a few of the projects that have been funded.

EAP087/1/1: Letter from Muhammad Bello to the Emir of Bauchi Yaqub. [Between 1882-1893] Nigeria

  EAP001/1/1: Photographs from Esfahan taken by Minas Patkerhanian Machertich [1900-1970s]

Cathy Collins

EAP Grants Administrator

@bl_eap

 

This month two projects have gone online, EAP352 and EAP764.

The first of these projects is EAP352. The project digitised Arabic and Jawi (Arabic Malay) manuscripts that come from two regions in Indonesia - Western Sumatra (Minangkabau region) and Jambi. The 11 collections held in private hands contain manuscripts from two Sufi brotherhoods: Shattariyah and Naqshbandiyah.

The texts include treatises on the peculiarities of regional Islam such as the history of local religious traditions, hagiographical works and documents on the Naqshbandiyah and Shattariyah mystical conceptions written by local Shaikh’s. They also contain unique examples of calligraphy, illumination and bookbinding. The manuscripts describing Suluk mystical ritual are particularly noteworthy, as the ritual is practiced only in the remote corners of Sumatra and is considered to be unpopular among younger generations of Muslims. They contain interesting examples of al-Qur’an and works on traditional medicine in Jambi.

Study of such written heritage can contribute greatly to the history of Sumatra as well as the history of Islam and Sufism. 

EAP352/1/6: Dalail al-Khairat [19th century copy of the famous work of Shadziliyah Sheikh of the 15th cent. Muhammad al-Jazuli from Northern Africa] – Image 39

The second project is EAP764, a pilot project which surveyed documentary material located in the archive of the Prefecture of Bandiagara (Mali). This was undertaken in order to preserve collections of historical and anthropological relevance from the early decades of French colonialism. The archival material falls within the wide area of the Cercle, an administrative unit introduced in 1903 by the French, which came to encompass a territory reaching up to Burkina Faso. Bandiagara is still the capital of the Dogon country, an area of extraordinary cultural interest and is included in the UNESCO World Heritage list. Since the region is rich with oral traditions and has few written records, such documents, written in French by the colonial administrators, represent valuable and unique evidence of a historical period which has been little investigated. The collections identified will be of great interest for researchers looking at the history, law, religion, anthropology, politics, demography and economy of the region.

The project was successful in identifying the most endangered and precious collections dating back to the early decades of the 20th century. A sample of these collections was digitised and is now available to view online.

EAP764/1/1/1: Tribunal de Province du premier janvier 1912 au 28 avril 1914 Court of Province from Jan 1, 1912 to April 28, 1914 – Image 6

Check back next month to see what else has been added!

You can also keep up to date with any new collections by joining our Facebook group.

31^st July is Uncommon Musical Instrument Awareness Day and so I thought it would give me an excuse to delve into the EAP collections to see what I could find and yet again the rare photographic negatives from Mongolia (EAP264) came up trumps with a whole series dedicated to folk instruments taken during the 1930s to 1950s (EAP264/1/1/8).

The instrument most commonly associated with Mongolia is the morin khuur, a spiked fiddle with trapezoid base but most importantly with a horse’s head carved at the top of the peg box – the translation of morin khuur meaning horse’s fiddle. The instrument was traditionally played only by men, the instrument being passed down the family line through the eldest son. Khalkha Mongolians have a proverb that a household with a horse-head fiddle is a full home whilst one without is a widow’s dwelling.

Typically, the instrument accompanies the ‘long song’. As the name implies, these songs last for a lengthy amount of time but the name also refers to the fact that each syllable has an extended duration. The illustration below shows a morin khuur player accompanying a singer.

EAP264/1/1/8/11

Traditionally, the sounding box was covered in hide made from suckling sheep, goat or camel  producing a soft tone appropriate for the intimate surroundings of a ger (yurt). However, during the Soviet years (when these photographs were taken) the instrument was also turned into one played in the theatre and, to make it louder, the sounding box was made from wood.

This close up of a morin khuur peg box shows the horse head with a carving of a dragon directly beneath which is quite common. However what is rather unusual is that in this example, a second and much smaller horse’s head can be seen towards the back.

EAP264/1/1/8/45

This photograph of a group of musicians shows two morin khuur players with two huuchir players seated either side. One huuchir has a plain peg box, whilst the other has a carving of a horse’s head.

EAP264/1/1/8/3

These instruments are quite common throughout the Gobi region and unlike the morin khuur which has just two strings, the huuchir has four. It has a smaller sound box, either cylindrical, octagonal or hexagonal, with a fretless neck and a metal ring that can be adjusted along the neck to adjust the pitch, which can just be made out in the photograph below.

  EAP264/1/1/8/13

The name huuchir is very similar to the Chinese word for the same family of instruments ‘huqin’ (胡琴). Hu (胡) is the generic term for people living to the north or west of China’s borders and implies that the instrument was introduced to China from the Steppes.

Do have a look at the rest of the photographs as there are many more musical instruments to be discovered.

EAP264/1/1/8/6

 

References:

Carole Pegg Mongolian Music, Dance and Oral Narrative  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001

Mitchell Clark Sounds Of The Silk Road: Musical Instruments Of Asia Boston: MFA Publications, 2005

This month three projects have gone online, EAP080, EAP660 and EAP769.

The first of these projects, EAP080, microfilmed Serbian musical collections from the Craftsmen choral society in Zemun. Choral societies were a prominent part of Serbian musical culture in the 19th century. Between 1834 and 1914 over 150 Serbian choral societies were founded. Some of them had extremely rich musical libraries, with thousands of scores and choral parts. Unfortunately, only a few of them preserved their full musical collections, which often included original manuscripts. Numerous collections were lost, divided or even destroyed. 

The musical collection of the Craftsmen choral society from Zemun contains 27 large boxes of material: manuscripts, handwritten and printed scores, mostly choral music, stage music as well as some documents on the history of the society. The compositions are written by Serbian, Russian, Czech, German, Austrian and Italian composers.

This collection is an excellent example of the typical musical taste of a growing citizen class. Judging by stamps and signatures, it seems as if other choirs' libraries were added and came from the Serbian Orthodox Choral Society and the Academic Choir, both from Zemun, and the Cathedral Choir from Novi Sad.

EAP080/1/8/3/4: Image 12 - Unknown author, Ukoricene crvene, plave i zelene sveske [Music note books with red, blue and green covers]

The second project this month, EAP660, digitised copies of Nur-i-Afshan, a periodical published by the Presbyterian Mission in the Punjab. Sometimes published weekly, and other times bi-monthly. Nur-i-Afshan, was a multifaceted news magazine and carried local and international news summaries, government postings, commodity prices, and advertisements, but also opinion articles, essays, proverbs, and poems.

This periodical is one of the very few primary sources originating locally in pre-partition India, which shows Christian missionary work in the Punjab. In addition to being a religious publication, Nur-i-Afshan also forms part of a large and growing corpus of Urdu periodicals published in the nineteenth century and gives the researcher invaluable insight into the thinking, concerns, and ideas of nineteenth century Indians and enables a better understanding of the social, political and religious forces at play during this period. Furthermore, the study of such periodicals is of interest to scholars engaged in linguistics and language development. As the nineteenth century was a key age in the development of the Urdu language, the styles of prose, grammar, and diction used in this publication are important research materials. The role of a missionary society in taking up a local vernacular for discourse at that time makes the importance of Nur-i-Afshan even greater and its study more significant.

EAP660/1/26/60: Image 1 - Nur-i-Afshan December [1900 volume 28 no.52] [1900]

The final project this month is EAP769, a pilot project which looked at archives and records from the Caribbean island of Montserrat, a country that has suffered from harsh environmental conditions and natural disasters. Inappropriate storage and handling has resulted in material being lost or rapidly deteriorating, creating an urgent need for proper preventive conservation care. Recent volcanic activity destroyed many of the previous storage facilities.

This project identified archival material held throughout Montserrat, assessed its condition and prepared a long term plan for its safe storage, digitisation and increased public access and awareness of this endangered resource.

The pilot project worked on the collections of original material held by the Montserrat National Trust (MNT). This comprises of 18th and 19th century estate plans and deeds; 20th century letters, newspapers, land deeds, wills, receipts; and collections of slide photographs from the 1980s, including a 1986 historic buildings survey which show many buildings no longer standing after the 1995 and 1997 volcanic eruptions.

EAP769/3/3/1: Image 1 – Historic Building Survey 1986

In addition, the project worked on some of the 18th century records held at the Central Library, a collection in private ownership, and material held by the Government Registry Office.

Sample digitisation of selected material was undertaken and is now available to view online.

EAP769/3/1/12: Image 6 - Sale of Champion Jones Properties [1910]

Check back next month to see what else has been added!

You can also keep up to date with any new collections by joining our Facebook group.

This month we have had one project go online, EAP656. This is a project from Uganda which digitised the photographic archive of Ham Mukasa, a leading intellectual and ethnographer in Buganda, a subnational kingdom within Uganda. The collection dates from 1868-1956 and makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of this period in Uganda’s history. The collection includes over 2000 photographs.

EAP656/1/1/8: A couple dancing – Image 10

Ham Mukasa lived as a page in the court of King Muteesa I of Buganda, and may have been first exposed to photography in that setting (a knowledge of photography having been introduced to the court by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, in 1875). Mukasa was certainly taking photographs by the 1890s. Initial surveys of his collection suggest that he was particularly active as a photographer in the period 1900-1920, although he continued to take pictures right up to his death, in 1956.

EAP656/1/1/1: Ham Mukasa with his second wife Sarah, his two daughters from the first marriage and other children taken while seated in front of a house. – Image 4

Ham Mukasa was active during the period of British penetration into the region of Buganda; he was a key figure in the court of King Daudi Chwa II (1856-1884) and was secretary to Buganda’s Prime Minister Apolo Kagwa. His images offer valuable clues on the early history of colonialism in Uganda and aid the understanding of the fields of African history, anthropology and African visual studies/art history.

EAP656/3/1/2: Men playing on drums. - Image 30

The EAP website does not contain catalogue information about individual photographs, this can be obtained through the British Libraries ‘Search our Catalogue Archives and Manuscripts’ this can searched for via this link.

EAP656/1/1/8: Image 60 - A lady holding a child with another boy and girl sitting beside her.

Check back next month to see what else has been added!

You can also keep up to date with any new collections by joining our Facebook group.