In 2008, an international team of climbers discovered a large collection of Tibetan manuscripts in a cave complex called Mardzong, in Nepal's remote Mustang district, south of Lo Monthang. The following year, the entire cache - over five thousand folios from some sixty different works of the Buddhist and Bön religions, some more than seven centuries old - were removed to the safe keeping of a monastery, where they were later examined by experts from different disciplines. Bön religious manuscripts were not traditionally seen as artefacts characterized by a distinguished form and technology. As a result, the numerous manuscripts of the Bön religion have not been clearly identified as a separate corpus so far, they have not been subjected to codicological and material research, despite their importance for the study of history and religions of Central Asia. The main focus of this research is the collection of Mardzong manuscripts preserved in the Chöde Monastery in Lo Monthang in Mustang (Nepal). Through our research, dating, cataloguing, and photographing, we aim to make these manuscripts available to Western scholars, the Tibetan community, and people in Nepal. Overall, our aim is to build, via scientific analysis of the paper on which the texts are written as well as codicological study, a solid geographical and periodical catalogue that will cover at least the last two centuries, and provide data for earlier works found in caves as well. By expanding the scope of research from the manuscripts’ textual content to their material characteristics, we move beyond legends to a more precise understanding of the history of the Mardzong deposit and its role in the local community in the past.
This dataset contains 356 photographs of the manuscript pages with handwritten text. It is a part of the collection of manuscripts from the Mardzong Caves in Mustang, Nepal.
File naming convention within .zip archive:
KluBum1_009r.jpg
KluBum1 → collection name and number
009 → page number
r / v → recto / verso
Detailed information on writing, materials, format and layout is provided in a readme.txt file attached to this dataset.
