Nepalese ms destruction

[Mi. Witzel]

Sorry, Jonathan: I cannot answer this question. MSS in the Terai lowlands
(and elsewhere outside the Valley)  were filmed long after I had left the
project.  I know we have filmed Maithili/Skt. MSS in the Janakpur area,
though.

Unfortunately, the new NGMPP CD (rough catalogue of all Skt. etc.,
non-Tibetan MSS) does not specify yet where the MSS were filmed.

We have to ask other former local directors of the project (1970-2002), or
better, contact the NGMPP office in Hamburg, where they are cataloguing (in
detail) all, more than 100 K MSS filmed by the project.

See: http://www.uni-hamburg.de/ngmpp/  or  Nepal Research Centre,
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/Wiss/FB/10/IndienS/NRC/index.html    or:
nrc at wlink.com.np

See the reports: http://www.uni-hamburg.de/ngmpp/reports.html

Michael


===============


>A question:
>
>>J. Huntingdon wrote:
>>
>>>About eighteen  months months ago, in Dang ...  The "Maoists" burned  the
>>>western branch of the Sanskrit University to the ground. It contained
>>>an estimated 12,000 Sanskrit manuscripts, ....
>
>
>And Michael wrote:
>
>>
>>Are you SURE about the mss?  The newpaper at the time (see below)  spoke
>>only of printed  books, and a friend whom I asked mentioned only, if I
>>recall correctly,  "office materials, files" not mss.  I also  doubt that
>>they would have collected 12,000 or even 50,000 mss. in just 14 years...
>
>Michael is the idea person to answer the following: if there were Skt
>MSS in this University, would not we expect that they had been
>photographed by the NGMPP? (Not that this would make the destruction
>of the mss any more palatable, of course).
>
>JAS
>
>--
>Jonathan Silk
>Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures
>Center for Buddhist Studies
>UCLA
>290 Royce Hall
>Box 951540
>Los Angeles, CA 90095-1540
>phone: (310)206-8235
>fax:  (310)825-8808
>silk at humnet.ucla.edu
============================================================
Michael Witzel
Department of Sanskrit & Indian Studies, Harvard University
1 Bow Street, Cambridge MA 02138, USA

ph. 1- 617-496 2990 (also messages)
home page:  http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm