Thousands Of Ancient Thai Manuscripts Now Available Online

MessageToEagle.com – The Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts bringing thousands of ancient manuscripts making them available as open source material online.

The digital library contains images of approximately 5,000 manuscripts of ancient Thai literature, codes of law and history, which can be searched and viewed online or downloaded for free at lannamanuscripts.net. Much of the original content is being shared online for the first time. Most of the texts were written on palm-leaf and have been stored in the libraries of Buddhist monasteries and in private collections.

More materials with related resources from the region will be added to build the database out to more than 7,000 manuscripts.

“Anyone from students and researchers to monks and nuns can now read this preserved literature of an entire people,” Justin McDaniel, professor and chair of the religious studies department and principle investigator for the project said.

Professor Justin McDaniel has spent much of his career much of his career working with manuscripts in monastic libraries in rural areas of Thailand and Laos, reading, translating and helping to preserve them.

See also:
Vatican Library Puts 4,000 Ancient Manuscripts Available Online For Free

“It’s mostly Buddhist material, but also scientific material, historical material, botany, astrology, grammar, folk tales, philosophical tales, a massive corpus going back from 1410 to the 1950s when print became more popular,” McDaniel said.
The project is launched by the University of Pennsylvania and the National Library of Laos.

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