The Mardzong Manuscripts

In The Mardzong Manuscripts Agnieszka Helman-Ważny and Charles Ramble recount the discovery of a cache of Bön and Buddhist manuscripts, some over seven centuries old, in the remote Mardzong caves in Mustang, Nepal, and subsequent research on the collection.

This book tells the story of the Mardzong manuscripts, a collection found in 2008 in the caves of Upper Mustang near Lo Monthang in Nepal, re-visited four times between 2015 and 2018 by the project team. These manuscripts are an extraordinary archaeological find, akin to the more archaic caches of the Silk Road manuscripts from Central Asia, but far less is known of them. They constitute a repository teeming with artefacts, rich in history, and abounding with information about Tibetan book culture, the Bon and Buddhist religions and the local history of craftsmanship spanning half a millennium, carbon dated as they have been to between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Through a thorough multidisciplinary approach this study reveals new ways of treating these books as artefacts with an unprecedented potential to illuminate the history of their production, usage and provenance. It also vastly increases the interpretative integrity of the analyses of the materials, codicological records and textual interpretations. This is the first collection of books from Mustang to be subjected to systematic codicological research and material study beyond the translation and interpretation of the texts.

Inscriptions are a rather neglected field within Tibetan Studies, because they are often located in places that are not easily accessible for both geographical and political reasons. It is thus especially welcome that two of the contributions to this volume deal with inscriptions documented on recent field trips to Tibet: Benjamin Wood discusses an inscription in Zha lu that relates an enigmatic conflict in the history of the monastery, and Kurt Tropper looks into an epigraphic cycle on the life of the Buddha in Tsaparang. Moreover, Nathan Hill provides a new interpretation of the beginning of the famous Rkong po inscription, and Kunsang Namgyal Lama surveys the various kinds of texts found on tsha tshas. An extra level of reflection is added to the volume by Cristina Scherrer-Schaub’s methodological considerations on the classification and interpretation of inscriptions.

In Archaeology of Tibetan Books, Agnieszka Helman-Ważny explores the varieties of artistic expression, materials, and tools that have shaped Tibetan books over the millennia. Digging into the history of the bookmaking craft, the author approaches these ancient texts primarily through the lens of their artistry, while simultaneously showing them as physical objects embedded in pragmatic, economic, and social frameworks. She provides analyses of several significant Tibetan books—which usually carry Buddhist teachings—including a selection of manuscripts from Dunhuang from the 1st millennium C.E., examples of illuminated manuscripts from Western and Central Tibet dating from the 15th century, and fragments of printed Tibetan Kanjurs from as early as 1410. This detailed study of bookmaking sheds new light on the books' philosophical meanings.

The present volume offers a dozen studies of manuscripts of the Tibetan Bon and Naxi Dongba traditions across time and space. While some of the contributions focus on particular features of manuscripts from either tradition, others explicitly bridge the two by considering common codicological and material aspects of selected examples or common themes in the content of the texts. This is the first primarily object-based study to deal with the cultural history and technology of books from the two traditions. It discusses collections of Bon and Naxi manuscripts, the concepts and history of both traditions, the science and technology of book studies as it relates to these collections, the relationship between text and image, writing materials, and the historical and archaeological context of the manuscripts' places of origin. The authors are specialists in different fields including philology, anthropology, art history, codicology and archaeometry. The contributions shed light on trade routes, materials and technologies as well as on reading practices and ritual usage of Bon and Naxi manuscripts.

Tsybikov’s book has both the vividness of a traveller’s eyewitness account and the informed detachment of a scholar. It is a unique and invaluable snapshot of religious practices and the everyday life in Tibet before Chinese inroads during the twentieth century effaced that way of life.

Conservation of Books is the highly anticipated reference work on global book structures and their conservation, offering the first modern, comprehensive overview on this subject. The volume takes an international approach to its subject. Written by over 70 specialists in conservation and conservation science based in 19 countries, its 26 chapters cover traditional book structures from around the world, the materials from which they are made and how they degrade, and how to preserve and conserve them. It also examines the theoretical underpinnings of conservation: what and how to treat, and the ethical, cultural, and economic implications of treatment. Technical drawings and photographs illustrate the structures and treatments examined throughout the book. Ultimately, readers gain an in-depth understanding of the materiality of books in numerous global contexts and reflect on the practical considerations involved in their analysis and treatment. Conservation of Books is a quintessential reference work for book conservators and anyone working with books, such as collection managers, librarians, curators, dealers, collectors, historians, and related professionals. It is also an indispensable text for students to complement hands-on training in this field.

The proposed book explores locally-produced documents from Mustang, Nepal, mostly dated to the year within the last two centuries. The archives are from five communities: Tshognam, Geling, Lubrak, and Jharkot. The documents were preserved in wooden or metal boxes, baskets or bags as a loose assemblage of folded sheets of paper. Some of the collections are from private households, whereas others are the communal property of villages, in which case they could be opened and photographed only in the presence of community representatives. The documents are of several different kinds, including contracts, petitions, edicts, letters, dispute resolutions, tax records and community regulations. Besides being an important source of information for the reconstruction of Mustang's social history, are an extremely valuable source of knowledge about local paper- and book-production. It is not only their content but their material that provides information essential to tracing a past history, clarifying, among other things, the economic factors that shaped their production.