Four New Digital Projects Now Available Online From the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (EAP)

From the EAP Blog:

We have another four new projects we can share with you this month [April 2020] that have recently been made available online. If you didn’t read last month’s blog you can see it here. It features projects from Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, and the small Caribbean island of Nevis. On to this month’s projects:

• Pa’O religious and literary manuscripts from Shan State, Myanmar [EAP104]

The manuscripts digitised during this project constitute the largest and most comprehensive Pa’O literary and religious studies resource outside of Pa’O regions in Myanmar and Thailand. The original manuscripts, a mixture of parabaik (accordion folded paper manuscripts), bound scrolls, and palm-leaf manuscripts, are owned by the Pa’O Literary and Cultural Council Committee Library in Taunggyi, Shan State, Myanmar.

• Records relating to the Tamil Protestant community of the Jaffna Peninsula, Sri Lanka [EAP835]

The aim of this ‘pilot’ project was to survey the print and manuscript materials of the Tamil Protestant community of Jaffna in Sri Lanka. There is a wealth of material documenting this community and the role of missionaries from the UK and United States. The American Ceylon Mission press for example printed more than 500,000 evangelical tracts in a 17-year period leading up to 1840. Much of this is Tamil-language translations of American texts, but there are also significant amounts of material relating to Tamil epic poetry and literature, ethical treatises, pedagogical works, devotional literature, and many polemical essays on Saivism and Christian‐Saivite exchanges.

• Colonial records from the French colony of Middle Congo (Republic of the Congo) [EAP844]

This pilot project set out to locate and document colonial archives from the former French colony of Middle Congo, in present-day Pointe-Noire, Republic of the Congo. While archives in Brazzaville have been more widely studied, the archives in Pointe-Noire have largely been unknown and inaccessible to researchers.

• Sanskrit and Malayalam manuscripts from monasteries in Thrissur, Kerala, India [EAP1039]

This pilot project produced a survey of 238 of the 800 palm leaf manuscripts held in the four monasteries that constitute the Hindu monastic complex of Thrissur in Kerala, India. This collection contains rare unpublished Sanskrit and Malayalam works, especially in the field of non-dualist philosophy (Advaita-Vedānta), Kerala history and hagiography

Learn More, Direct to Complete Blog Post

See Also: Four New EAP Projects Released During March 2020

See Also: Explore All EAP Collections

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