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经成为需要仔细保护和研究的全球遗产的一部分。在这些文物中，手稿占据着独特的地位，因为它们用早已逝去的男人和女人的实际语言与我们交谈，将他们的信仰、思想和情感带回眼前的生活。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，但到目前为止，即使是专家也鲜为人知。它们包括用几种南亚语言编写的近2000份文件，用不同的文字和不同的支架写成，如桦树皮、棕榈叶和纸。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。其中一小部分是在19世纪编目的，但直到20世纪90年代，新的收购才丰富了这些藏品。这些收藏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，不同流派，涉及从宗教和哲学到天文、语法、法律和诗歌等一系列主题，其中大多数尚未出版。在它的珍宝中，有一些现存的最古老的南亚手稿：两件尼泊尔样本，可以追溯到公元1世纪末--特别是在一个气候恶劣的地区，通常不允许它们在几个多世纪内存活。该项目将根据国际公认的古代和中世纪手稿来源编目标准，对图书馆藏品进行全面调查，收集每件藏品的所有基本信息。这一过程将收集关于手稿的物理特征的数据，通过对其内容的研究来确定无标题作品，试图根据它们的古地理和材料特征确定它们的年代，并将它们置于更广泛的历史背景中。通过将传统的文献学方法与先进的信息技术相结合，该项目将以各种形式向南亚学术界以及普通公众提供这些特别文件。从手稿调查中获得的所有调查结果将被收集在一个广泛的数字档案馆中，可在网上进行搜索。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和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，以便纳入其在线目录。将为图书馆藏品中的大量物品拍摄数字照片，并将其与目录记录联系起来。在调查和编目的同时，项目研究人员将通过与英国和海外的梵文教友合作调查这些丰富的材料，展示这些主要手稿来源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组织的两次国际会议上公布，分别关注密宗和佛教，这两种宗教传统在南亚--乃至整个亚洲--文明中发挥了关键作用，并在图书馆的收藏中得到了丰富的记录。这些发现还将通过学术期刊和其他出版物上的论文进行传播。在该项目完成后，预计将开展规模较小的项目，以最终实现对除梵语以外的所有南亚手稿的编目和整个收藏的数字化。

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host of subjects, from religion and philosophy to astronomy, grammar, law and poetry, the majority of which are as yet unpublished.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.