The intellectual and religious traditions of South Asia as seen through the Sanskrit manuscript collections of the University of Cambridge.

在一个似乎越来越小的世界里，每一件记录古代文明历史的文物都已成为全球遗产的一部分，需要仔细保护和研究。在这些人工制品中，手稿占据了独特的地位，因为它们用早已逝去的男人和女人的真实话语向我们说话，将他们的信仰，思想和情感带回到现实生活中。在这方面，剑桥大学图书馆收藏的南亚手稿是一种宝贵的资源，但迄今为止，即使是专家也对它们知之甚少。它们包括近2000份文件，由几种南亚语言组成，以各种文字和不同的载体书写，如桦树皮，棕榈叶和纸张。其中一半以上是梵语，这种语言在近两千年的时间里主导了前现代南亚的书面文化。其中一小部分在19世纪被编目，但直到20世纪90年代，新的收购丰富了藏品。这些收藏品包括非常罕见的作品，其中一些装饰华丽，来自次大陆的不同地区，不同的流派和主题，从宗教和哲学到天文学，语法，法律和诗歌，其中大多数尚未出版。其宝藏中有一些来自南亚的现存最古老的手稿：两份尼泊尔手稿可追溯到公元前第一个千年末--这是一个例外，因为该地区不利的气候通常不允许它们存活几个世纪以上。该项目将对图书馆馆藏进行详尽的调查，按照国际公认的古代和中世纪手稿来源编目标准，将每一项的所有基本信息汇集在一起。这一过程将收集关于手稿物理特征的数据，通过其版权或其内容的研究来确定无标题作品，试图根据其古文字和材料特征确定其年代，并在更广泛的历史背景下对其进行分类。通过将传统的文献学方法与先进的信息技术相结合，该项目将以各种格式向南亚学者和公众提供这些非凡的文件。从手稿调查中获得的所有结果将被收集在一个广泛的数字档案中，可以在网上搜索。这将是进一步研究南亚知识传统、宗教崇拜、文学文化和政治思想及群体历史的有力工具。目录记录将从项目数据库中提取，并提供给剑桥大学图书馆，以纳入其在线目录。将对图书馆收藏的大量物品拍摄数码照片，并与目录记录相联系。在调查和编目的同时，项目研究人员将通过与英国的梵语学者合作，调查这一丰富的材料。这些原始手稿在南亚和国外的重要性，证明了这些原始手稿对殖民前南亚历史的重要性。他们的研究成果将在该项目第二年和第三年举办的两次国际会议上发表，分别侧重于密宗和佛教，这两种宗教传统在南亚-以及一般亚洲-文明中发挥了关键作用，并在图书馆的馆藏中有丰富的记录。调查结果还将通过学术期刊和其他出版物上的论文传播。该项目完成后，预计将开展小规模项目，以最终实现所有南亚梵语以外语言的手稿的编目和整个收藏品的数字化。

In a world that seems increasingly small, every artefact documenting the history of ancient civilisations has become part of a global heritage that needs to be carefully preserved and studied. Among such artefacts, manuscripts occupy a distinctive place in as much as they speak to us with the actual words of long-gone men and women, bringing back their beliefs, ideas and sensibilities to immediate life. In this respect, the collections of South Asian manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library are a precious resource, but so far they are little known even to specialists. They comprise almost 2000 documents composed in several South Asian languages, written in various scripts and on different supports, such as birch-bark, palm-leaf and paper. More than half of these are in Sanskrit, the language that dominated the written culture of pre-modern South Asia for almost two millennia. A small portion of them were catalogued in the 19th century, but the collections were enriched by new acquisitions until the 1990s. The collections include works of great rarity, some of them lavishly decorated, from different parts of the subcontinent, in different genres and on a host of subjects, from religion and philosophy to astronomy, grammar, law and poetry, the majority of which are as yet unpublished. Among its treasures are some of the oldest extant manuscripts from South Asia: two Nepali exemplars dating from the end of the first millennium C.E - exceptionally, in a region whose unfavourable climate does not generally allow their survival for more than a few centuries. The Project will carry out an exhaustive survey of the library holdings, putting together all the basic information for each item in keeping with internationally recognised standards for the cataloguing of ancient and medieval manuscript sources. This process will gather data on the physical characteristics of the manuscripts, identify untitled works, either through their colophons or the study of their content, attempt to date them on the basis of their palaeographic and material features and situate them in their broader historical context. By combining traditional philological methods with advanced information technology, the Project will make these extraordinary documents available in various formats to the scholarly community of South-Asianists as well as to the general public. All the findings obtained from the survey of the manuscripts will be collected in an extensive digital archive that will be searchable online. This will be a powerful tool for further investigation into the history of South Asian intellectual traditions, religious cults, literary cultures and political ideas and groupings. Catalogue records will be drawn from the Project database and made available to the Cambridge University Library for incorporation into their online catalogues. Digital photographs will be taken of a substantial number of items in the Library's collections and linked to the catalogue records. In parallel to the survey and cataloguing, the Project researchers will investigate this wealth of material through a collaborative effort with fellow Sanskritists in the U.K. and abroad, demonstrating the importance of these primary manuscript sources for the history of pre-colonial South Asia. The results of their research will be presented in the course of two international conferences organised in the second and third year of the Project, focusing on Tantrism and Buddhism respectively, two religious traditions that have played a key role in South Asian - and generally Asian - civilisations and are richly documented in the Library's collections. The findings will also be disseminated through papers in academic journals and other publications. After the completion of the Project, smaller-scale projects are envisaged to achieve the eventual cataloguing of all South Asian manuscripts in languages other than Sanskrit and the digitisation of the whole collection.