30 May 2023
EAP Digital Lecture Series
Every now and then, researchers notify us of a conference talk focusing on content digitised by EAP projects. We are always thrilled to be told about these talks and it prompted us to create a digital lecture series of our own. We approached a handful of people, who we knew had worked on EAP content and they, very kindly, agreed to take part. We have created two themes in the first instance: Narratives within the Archive and Manuscripts on Magic and the links to the individual lectures are below. The presentations are absolutely fascinating and we hope you enjoy listening to them.
Narratives within the Archive
Dr Helga Baitenmann - Hidden Narratives of Indigenous Women in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Dr Mégane Coulon - Life histories in mid-nineteenth century Freetown, Sierra Leone
Manuscripts on Magic
Eyob Derillo (PhD student) - Ethiopian amulet scrolls, talisman and divination
Professor Fallou Ngom - Healing, Divination, and Protection Techniques in Wolof and Mandinka Manuscripts
Dr Sam van Schaik - Buddhist Magic
Dr Farouk Yahya - Malay Magic and Divination Manuscripts from Indonesia
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the contributors and if you are using EAP content for your own research and would like to notify us, please email us at [email protected].
30 September 2022
EAP video
EAP recently commissioned a short film, in the hope that it would raise the profile of the Programme and highlight the importance of making digitised content freely available to everyone. The video is now available on the Library’s YouTube channel and we hope you enjoying watching it.
EAP would like to thank the British Library Collections Trust for generously supporting the making of the film.
07 January 2022
East African Life-Writing and Colonial History: New Perspectives from EAP Tanzanian Church Records
Among the many fascinating sources from the Endangered Archives Programme’s EAP099 project, which conserved and digitised records of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania, is a set of Swahili-language essays, written in 1913 by young men at a German-led teacher training school.
The essays, written by 32 different authors on the subjects of their childhood and conversion to Christianity, are valuable examples of African life-writing during the era of European colonialism. Some of the authors went on to become leading church ministers and teachers. Others are unknown beyond the information left behind in these essays, which provide insights into early experiences of German colonial rule, reasons for conversion, and the impact of missionary activities on indigenous communities.
I came across the texts while conducting research for a three-month PhD Placement, in which I have been exploring the British Library’s collections for new perspectives on German colonial history. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania evolved from the Leipzig Mission, one of several German missions active in the region after it became the colony of German East Africa in 1885. The British Library has digital copies of Leipzig Mission sources, mostly produced between 1895 and the 1930s, which are held in the archive of the Northern Diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Moshi, Tanzania.
The role of Christian missions in European colonial projects is the subject of continuing debate. Missionaries’ goals sometimes conflicted with those of settlers and colonial administrations, and they occasionally helped to expose colonial atrocities. However, almost all missionaries supported European colonialism in principle, and missions were involved in various labour and educational initiatives to ‘elevate’ supposedly backward indigenous populations.
Around 95 percent of schools in German colonies were run by missions. As the school system in German East Africa expanded, it became necessary to train local people to become teachers, and to this end the Leipzig Mission opened the Marangu training school for teaching assistants in 1912. Among the first entrants were the young men who, in December 1913, were given the task of writing two essays: one about their early life, and another about their process of conversion.
The texts do not reflect local experiences of colonialism in all their variety. Most subaltern works of life-writing from the colonial era were produced in missionary contexts, and memoir material from those who refused to convert to Christianity is much more seldom. Furthermore, the students at Marangu came from various linguistically diverse parts of Tanzania, and had learned Swahili only upon joining mission schools. We do not know how far the challenge of writing in a second language affected the authors’ ability to tell their stories in the way they would have liked.
The essays nonetheless provide remarkable insights into life in Tanzania during the colonial era. We learn, for example, of the brutalities of German rule. Elia Tarimo’s essay on his childhood recalls the German army’s defeat of Chief Meli, the leader of the town of Moshi, in 1892, and the catastrophic consequences for Moshi civilians. ‘When the Europeans had defeated the Moshi people, they chopped down our banana trees, burned our houses and stayed on our land’, he writes.
An essay by Nderangusho Kimaro shows the effects of the ‘hut tax’, introduced by the German colonial authorities in 1898. Designed in part to make local people work on European plantations to raise the necessary money, the tax was enforced ruthlessly: failure to pay often resulted in askari (East African soldiers in the German colonial army) confiscating cattle. The local chief was sometimes held hostage until those in his village paid the tax.
When Kimaro’s mother could not afford to pay, her chief sold her livestock in order to gather the funds. Kimaro was then sent to work as a child labourer on a German plantation, and writes that he was beaten whenever he did not go to work there.
We also find out more about the authors’ reasons for converting to Christianity. Initial motivations for visiting the missionaries included the desire to learn to read and access to material benefits. An acquaintance with Christian teaching usually followed only later. Furthermore, the essays describe the strains on the authors’ relations with their family, friends and community in greater detail than most of the ‘conversion’ accounts by Africans which were published in Europe.
For many of the essay-writers, becoming a Christian meant ceasing to venerate one’s ancestors. This led to conflicts with friends and relatives. Elia Tarimo describes vividly the sense of fear as his family warned him that the spirit of his father, who was killed by the German forces in 1892, would in turn kill Tarimo if he embraced European culture. His teacher, however, told him that he would be condemned to hell if he did not convert before he died.
While some authors write of estrangement, others were eventually welcomed back by their families once they had been baptised. In some instances, the authors were not the only converts within their household. Filipo Njau’s decision to embrace Christianity was made easier by the fact that other family members had already done so. The essays thus hint at a variety of responses within communities to the changing circumstances caused by the European colonial presence.
Njau’s candid essay provides details on the early life of a long-serving representative of East African Christians. From 1926 until 1954, Njau worked as a teacher at the Marangu school at which he had been trained, and stood up for the dignity of Africans within the Church. He opposed, for example, the attempts by some white missionaries to uphold racist clothing distinctions by prohibiting black parishioners from wearing shoes.
My analysis of Njau’s text, and those of the other authors, relies upon German translations published in three volumes by Klaus-Peter Kiesel, who adds rich contextual information. Swahili speakers, however, will be able to read the digitised copies for themselves, and I hope that the essays will find wider audiences. Together with the church registers, parish council minutes, diaries and other source material digitised as part of the EAP099 project, they offer great potential for further research into the colonial, religious and social history of East Africa.
My thanks go to Professor Adam Jones for giving me permission to use the photos from the Leipzig Mission’s archive, and for providing further information about the historical context and the Endangered Archives Project EAP099.
Rory Hanna, PhD Placement Student, German Collections
References and further reading:
Klaus-Peter Kiesel (ed.), Kindheit und Bekehrung in Nord-Tanzania. Aufsätze von Afrikanern aus dem ehemaligen Deutsch-Ostafrika vom Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts, 3 vols (2005-2013) [https://ul.qucosa.de/landing-page/?tx_dlf[id]=https%3A%2F%2Ful.qucosa.de%2Fapi%2Fqucosa%253A32377%2Fmets]
Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge, 2012), YC.2011.a.17036
John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, 1979), X.800/27820
Gabriel Ogunniyi Ekemode, ‘German Rule in North-East Tanzania, 1885-1914’. PhD thesis (1973) [https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.817253]
Klaus Fiedler, Christianity and African Culture: Conservative German Protestant Missionaries in Tanzania, 1900-1940 (Leiden, 1996), YA.1996.b.5134
Robert B. Munson, The Nature of Christianity in Northern Tanzania: Environmental and Social Change, 1890-1916 (Lanham, MD: 2013), YC.2014.a.2048
Majida Hamilton, Mission im kolonialen Umfeld. Deutsche protestantische Missionsgesellschaften in Deutsch-Ostafrika (Göttingen, 2010), [https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/32525/610325.pdf;jsessionid=C76FC24EAFEA6E388577C3D60DB600FC?sequence=1]
Thomas Spear (ed.), Evangelisch-Lutherisches Missionsblatt. Extracts on Arusha and Meru, 1897-1914 (Madison, WI: 1995), YA.1996.b.4628
Thomas Spear and Isaria N. Kimamba (eds), East African Expressions of Christianity (Oxford, 1999), YC.1998.a.4866
Simon Gikandi, ‘African Literature and the Colonial Factor’, in Francis Irele and Simon Gikandi (eds), The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 379-397, YC.2005.a.268
Gareth Griffiths, African Literatures in English: East and West (New York, 2000), m00/27805
05 February 2021
New online - December 2020 and January 2021
We have a bumper blog this month, covering new projects that went online at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. While access to physical archives is currently restricted in many parts of the world, digital archives are increasingly important. Here are five recently digitised collections that are now freely available to access online:
- Nineteenth-century records in the Sierra Leone Public Archives [EAP782]
- Sanskrit Manuscripts and Books in the State of Jammu and Kashmir [EAP886]
- Manuscripts and Archival Documents of Russian Old Believers Escapists (Skrytniks) [EAP1017]
- Tibetan Bonpo Manuscripts [EAP1077]
- Thai-Mon palm-leaf manuscripts [EAP1123]
EAP782 - Nineteenth-century records in the Sierra Leone Public Archives
The EAP782 project team led by Professor Suzanne Schwarz digitised police, court, and colonial records housed at the Sierra Leone Public Archives.
The documents span a period from the formation of the British Crown colony of Sierra Leone to the formation of the Sierra Leone Protectorate. These records offer significant insights into the lives of inhabitants of the region.
These provide rare insight into the life experiences of formerly enslaved people and their descendants. By the mid-nineteenth century, the population was comprised mainly of liberated Africans (and their descendants) drawn from across West Africa. The digitised records reveal the practices used by successive colonial governors to re-settle tens of thousands of liberated Africans in Freetown and surrounding colonial villages, including Regent and Wilberforce.
The police and court records include the depositions of witnesses, as well as those brought before the court for different offences. Testimony from formerly enslaved people is particularly rare, and provides a basis for reconstructing biographical information on individuals uprooted and displaced by the Atlantic slave trade.
EAP886 - Sanskrit Manuscripts and Books in the State of Jammu and Kashmir
Led by Mr Chetan Pandey, the EAP886 project team digitised 46 books and manuscripts located in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, in India. In particular, they focussed on material relating to:
- Sanskritism
- Hinduism
- Kashmir Shaivism (a Tantric school of Mysticism indigenous to Kashmir)
- Tantra
- Mysticism.
EAP1017 - Manuscripts and Archival Documents of Russian Old Believers Escapists (Skrytniks)
The EAP1017 project team, led by Dr Irina Belayeva, digitised manuscripts and documents of the Skrytniks (Old Believers Escapists) - a social group that was in opposition to the Russian state, first to the Russian Empire and then to the Soviet Union.
The digitised material shows the structure of Skrytniks, their traditions, faith and intercommunication with other social groups.
EAP1077 - Tibetan Bonpo Manuscripts
Dr Valentina Punzi and the EAP1077 team digitised 6 collection of Tibetan manuscripts belonging to private households in the Qinghai Province of China. These include rare and unique ritual texts from the late 19th and early 20 centuries.
EAP1123 - Thai-Mon palm-leaf manuscripts
The Mons of Thailand and Burma were regional, cultural, and religious intermediaries and supported a palm leaf manuscript tradition into the 1920s. The EAP1123 project team, led by Dr Patrick McCormick, conducted a survey of 28 temples in and around Bangkok.
They also digitised a sample of manuscripts from six collections. Many of these texts are unknown in Burma, but they are key to understanding recent history in the region and the Mon role in intellectual history.
Combined, the survey and digitisation sample provide important insights into the history of the Mons in Thailand and Burma.
We will be continuing to publish more digital collections in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for those!
03 July 2020
New Projects Online - June 2020
In recent weeks we have continued to put new collections online. Here is a summary of four of the most recent projects to be made available.
- Notary Books of Bahia, Brazil, 1664-1910 [EAP703]
- Documentation of Endangered Temple Art of Tamil Nadu [EAP896]
- Fragile Palm Leaves Digitisation Initiative [EAP1150]
- Safeguarding Colonial Plantation Records of Malawi [EAP1167]
EAP703 - Notary Books of Bahia, Brazil, 1664-1910
Until 1763, Bahia was the seat of the Portuguese colonial government in the Americas and a major sugar plantation economy based on African enslaved labour. Bahia received 33% of the Brazilian trade and 14.5% of the total. Being an administrative and economic centre, and until the late eighteenth century the most important port of trade in the South Atlantic, the production of documents in Bahia was intense. In Brazil, the Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia (Bahia State Archives) is considered to be second in importance only to the National Archives in Rio de Janeiro.
This project digitised 1,329 volumes of Notary Books deposited at the Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia. In total 306,416 pages were digitised as part of the project.
The dates for the volumes ranges from 1664 to 1910. They therefore include the first two decades of the republican and post-emancipation period.
These documents represent perhaps the most dependable source for the study of the social and economic history of colonial and post-colonial Bahia up until the end of the 19th century. The notary books include records such as:
- Bills of sale (for plantations, land, houses, ships, slaves, etc)
- Wills and testaments
- Inheritance partition
- Power of attorney letters
- Marriage
- Dowry
- Labour and business contracts
- Children’s legitimisation papers
- Slave manumission papers.
EAP896 - Documentation of Endangered Temple Art of Tamil Nadu
EAP does not only fund the digitisation of manuscripts and documents that can be held in the hand. EAP supports digitisation of almost any at-risk historical material. The digitisation of temple art in Tamil Nadu is a prime example.
The rich cultural heritage of temple art in India is rapidly deteriorating because of vandalism, weather conditions, and practices such as burning camphor for ritual purposes. By digitising the artwork that adorns eight temples in Tamil Nadu, India, the EAP896 project team have helped preserve this art for research, enjoyment, and education.
The drawing lines found on the temple walls represent abstract forms painted several centuries ago. In the evolution of human cognitive expressions, painting is a significant milestone. The paintings are essentially made up of lines and colours and the figures that are represented are mostly mythical.
This project has resulted in a plethora of visually striking images.
EAP1150 - Fragile Palm Leaves Digitisation Initiative
In partnership with the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation and the Buddhist Digital Resource Centre, this project digitised 300 Pali and vernacular manuscripts in Burmese script.
Mostly created in the 18th and 19th century, these manuscripts contain approximately 1,000 discrete Buddhist texts on a variety of topics. These include:
- Law
- Poetry
- Stories of the Buddha
- Grammar
- Religious rituals
These manuscripts provide an invaluable primary resource for the study of Burmese and Theravada Buddhism, Pali philology, history, literature, regional codicology, pre-modern textual and scribal practices, and manuscript culture.
EAP1167 - Safeguarding Colonial Plantation Records of Malawi
This pilot project surveyed tea and tobacco plantation records from the colonial era in Nyasaland [Malawi]. The team located relevant records and created an inventory, which is available as an Excel spreadsheet.
The team also digitised a sample of records from 13 estates (1922-1966), which are freely available to view. These include:
- Title deeds
- Legal agreements
- Memoranda
- Correspondence
- Articles of association.
These four projects include a diverse range of content types and span three continents across several centuries. Combined, they aptly showcase the rich diversity of EAP projects.
Look out for even more diverse projects going online in the weeks in months ahead!
19 June 2019
New collections online - June 2019
Over the past few months we have made six new projects available to view online through our website. These new collections demonstrate the diverse variety of archives the EAP digitises, and includes eighteenth-century Brazilian royal orders, artwork and photography by Lalit Mohan Sen, colonial archives, Coptic manuscripts and prayer scrolls, war photography, and historic newspapers.
EAP627 - Digitising endangered seventeenth to nineteenth century secular and ecclesiastical sources in São João do Carirí e João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil
The aim of EAP627 was to digitise the oldest historical documents in the state of Paraíba, Brazil (located in the semi-arid hinterlands and on the humid coastline). The project team successfully digitised 266 historical documents, ranging from 1660 to 1931 and their digitisation resulted in c. 83,000 TIFF images being created. It includes the entire collection of ecclesiastical documents at Paróquia de Nossa Senhora dos Milagres do São João do Cariri (comprised of 54 volumes produced between 1752 and 1931). During digitisation, the team uncovered the original, signed Constitution of Paraíba of 1891 – the first constitution of this state after Brazil was declared a republic in 1889. To the best of their knowledge and research, the project team believes this is the only existing copy of the document. The digital preservation of these documents have already contributed to shifting the historical narrative of the state’s back lands, and will ensure the ongoing possibility of study in the history of Paraíba’s Afro-Brazilian, indigenous, and mestiço populations.
EAP781 - Santipur and its neighbourhood: text and image production history from early modern Bengal through public and private collections
EAP781/1/7/1 - Photographs and artwork by Lalitmohan Sen
This was a continuation of EAP643, an earlier pilot project. The project team were able to digitise almost all the records discovered in the pilot. The collection includes 1265 manuscripts from Santipur Bangiya Puran Parishad, 78 bound volumes from Santipur Municipality, and 510 images of Lalit Mohan Sen’s artwork and photography. Some of Sen’s work can be seen in this previous EAP blog post.
EAP820 - Documenting Slavery and Emancipation in Kita, Western Mali
Kita is an important site in the history of rural slave emancipation in Western Mali (occurring at the turn of the twentieth century). It hosted the highest number of ‘Liberty villages’ (17 in total) following the French conquest (Western Mali was the first region of today’s Mali to be colonised by the French from the 1890s). Liberty villages hosted the slaves of the defeated enemies of the French army. The project team captured this specific history of slavery and emancipation in Kita through digitised reports, correspondence and court registers held in the Cercle archives of Kita. The collection is extensive, ancient and rare in its content, and is of great scholarly significance.
EAP823 - Digitisation and preservation of the manuscript collection at the Monastery of St Saviour in Old Jerusalem
The objective of this project was to digitise and make widely available the manuscripts at the Franciscan monastery of St Saviour in the Old City of Jerusalem. The collection dates from the 12th to the 20th century, and is written in seventeen languages: Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Classical Ethiopic, Coptic (Bohairic & Sahidic), English, French, Old German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Samaritan, Spanish, Syriac and Turkish. The digitised material is remarkably diverse and is a valuable resource for scholars interested in Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions, as well as to linguists and philologists, art historians, and musicologists. The texts contain theological and philosophical treatises, biblical and liturgical books, dictionaries, profane and religious poetry, collections of sermons, pilgrim accounts, and also cooking recipes and magic prayers. Among the books are also rare items, for instance texts written in Armenian and Arabic scripts but in Turkish language, and the fragments of Byzantine manuscripts used for the flyleaves in bindings. A special group is made up by large size liturgical books with musical notations, produced for monastic choirs, as well as precious volumes lavishly decorated and illuminated with miniatures, initials and aniconic ornamentation. Research material of particular value consists of a variety of book covers (leather, textile, metal, decorative cardboards etc.) representing diverse binding methods.
EAP894 - Endangered photographic collections about the participation of pre-industrial Bulgaria in three wars in the beginning of the 20th century
EAP894/1/24 - Single and group photographs of Rada Bozhinova (Box 24)
EAP894/1/15 - Scenes from urban and rural life (Box 15)
The EAP894 project team digitised two collections of photographs (and other records) from the pre-industrial development era of Bulgaria, covering the period 1880-1930. Colonel Petar Darvingov, the Chief of Staff of the Bulgarian Army and a commander of the occupation corps in Moravia (now the Czech Republic and Serbia) created the first collection. He captured moments of military action in the Balkans and Central Europe across three wars: the Balkan War, the Second Balkan War, and World War I. Within the collection are a large volume of photos from different fronts – positional photos of infantry and artillery units, fighting marches, frontline parades and prayers, aviation and motorized units, moments from tactical exercises, building of trenches, laying of roads and telephone wires, views of settlements, etc. Preserved are also the portraits, both group and individual, of the entire command staff of the Bulgarian army during the wars. The photographs record not only the military life at the front, but also at the rear – the camps and bivouacs, clothing, supplies, military equipment and everyday life of the Bulgarian soldier. Many of the backs of the photos have explanatory notes about specific events and characters. They include initiations, names and occasionally short biographical data on individual persons etc. The collection also includes military business cards with author´s notes, operational sketches of battlefields, sketches of the Bulgarian headquarters where the Serbian and Bulgarian troops were positioned during the Balkan Wars, stories of warfare during World War I, and sketches of military sites.
The second collection contains photos, cartoons and caricatures created by the renowned artist and photographer Aleksandar Bozhinov. He was one of the first significant cartoonists of the 20th century and a war correspondent. He documented military positions and the social life in the Balkan villages and towns in the time of war – daily life, work, calendar and festive rituals. The sketches and caricatures in the collection are both the originals and those published in albums and newspapers from the early 20th century. Copies of the Bulgarian comic newspaper (authored by Aleksandar Bozhinov) are also preserved in this collection.
EAP1086 - Preserving and digitising the historic newspaper, The Barbados Mercury Gazette
EAP1086/1/1/1/1 - The Barbados Mercury. 5 April 1783
This project digitised the Barbados Mercury and Bridgetown Gazette, a newspaper printed in Barbados from 1783 to 1839. The Gazette was printed biweekly and each issue was four pages long. It is the most complete set of the Gazette and the only copies known to exist. The newspaper is crucial for understanding Barbados’ 18th and 19th century history, particularly because these were formative years for the island. The newspaper sheds light on the everyday life of a slaveholding society; Bussa’s 1816 rebellion; and the events that led to the abolition of the slavery on the island (1834). Digitisation of the newspaper offers the opportunity to unearth an untold history of the enslaved people of the island and their resistance in the early nineteenth century. EAP1086 was a collaborative effort between a team of practitioners and scholars, based both in Barbados and abroad. At the end of the project around 2,331 issues were digitised with around 9,000 digital images in total.
Written by Alyssa Ali, EAP Apprentice
24 September 2018
Call for applications now open
Do you know of any collections that are currently at risk and need preserving? The Endangered Archives Programme is now accepting preliminary applications for the next annual funding round – the deadline for submission of preliminary applications is 12 noon 19 November 2018 and full details of the application procedures and documentation are available on the EAP website.
Digitising in Cuba
The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) has been running at the British Library since 2004 through funding by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, with the aim of preserving rare vulnerable archival material around the world. The Programme awards grants to relocate the material to a safe local archival home where possible, to digitise it, 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 Programme has funded over 350 projects in 90 countries world-wide and has helped to preserve manuscripts, rare printed books, newspapers and periodicals, audio and audio-visual materials, photographs and temple murals.
There three main types of grant:
- Pilot projects investigate the potential for and/or feasibility of a major grant. A pilot can also be a small digitisation project. They should last for no more than 12 months and have a budget limit of £15,000.
- Major projects gather and copy material. This type of grant may also relocate the material to a more secure location/institution within the country. These projects usually last 12 months, or up to 24 months and have a budget limit of £60,000.
- Area grants will be awarded for larger scale projects. They are similar to a major grant, but larger in scale and ambition. Applicants must demonstrate an outstanding track record of archival preservation work and be associated with an institution that has the capacity to facilitate a large-scale project. The EAP will only award a maximum of two area grants in each funding round. They can last for up to 24 months and have a budget limit of £150,000.
A further type of grant will be introduced in 2019:
- Rapid-response grants can be used to safeguard an archive which is in immediate and severe danger. These grants are intended for the most urgent situations where a delay in the decision process could result in extensive damage to the material. These grants are not subject to the time restrictions of the yearly EAP funding cycle and can be applied for at any time. They must last for less than 12 months and have a budget limit of £15,000.
If you know of an archive in a region of the world were resources are limited, we really hope you will apply. If you have any questions regarding the conditions of award or the application process, do email us at [email protected]
03 July 2017
New collections online - June 2017
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.
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]
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.
EAP816/1/2 - Pietroasa treasure
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.
EAP821/1/1/71 - Prayers for the Rosary of the Holy Mass [19th century]
Endangered archives blog recent posts
- EAP Digital Lecture Series
- EAP video
- East African Life-Writing and Colonial History: New Perspectives from EAP Tanzanian Church Records
- New online - December 2020 and January 2021
- New Projects Online - June 2020
- New collections online - June 2019
- Call for applications now open
- New collections online - June 2017
- New collections online - January 2017
- Call for Applications
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- South Asia
- South East Asia
- Theatre
- Traditional music
- Visual arts
- West Africa
- Wikipedia
- Women's histories
- Wood-block prints
- Writing