Expected Arrival on 10 MayThe Container Lab is on its Way to India

8 April 2024

To research valuable manuscripts around, the world, UWA has developed a mobile Container Lab. On 7 April, it was sent abroad for the first time. Over the next one and a half years, it will be used in India to analyse palm-leaf manuscripts that are part of the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage.

UHH/Esfandiari

Around 12,000 unexplored palm-leaf manuscripts are stored in Puducherry in southern India. They date from the late 18th and 19th centuries and are among the oldest surviving manuscripts of their kind. For historians, they are among the most important sources on religion, history, astrology, and medicine from a written culture that is around two thousand years old and belongs to one of the world’s most significant literary traditions.

However, the exact origin of the manuscripts is almost always unknown. Therefore, numerous questions remain unanswered, for example about the spread of certain religious cults. UWA researchers and scientists from India now want to answer some of these questions together. They will conduct material analyses of the manuscripts in a globally unique Container Lab, consisting of seven containers. Five contain laboratory rooms, another contains power generators and water supplies, and a seventh serves as storage.

‘We assemble the required equipment individually for every mission’, says Markus Fischer, food chemist and head of the Container Lab project. For example, it is equipped with a clean room for molecular biology work to determine the palm species whose leaves were used as writing support. The unknown scribes often wrote with a colour made from soot. Identical soot particles or recurring DNA structures in palm leaves could prove a common origin of different manuscripts.

CSMC

Challenging conditions on site

The conditions during the six-week sea voyage and the climate in southern India pose major challenges for the researchers. ‘In summer, the average temperature there is more than 30 degrees, and in October the monsoon begins with its extreme humidity. We have tested many devices here in Hamburg for their robustness and now hope that they will prove themselves on site’, says Fischer.

The researcher will accompany the container laboratory for several weeks, as will chemists Marina Creydt and Anastasia Poliakova and the Indologist Giovanni Ciotti, who is the head of the Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative. ‘A major challenge is that only non-invasive or minimally invasive methods can be used to analyse the manuscripts. They are part of the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage. To put it bluntly, you can’t just cut off a piece and put it under a microscope’, says Ciotti.

The documents are located on the premises of the Institut Français and the Ecole francaise d'Extrême-Orient in Puducherry. Since 2005, they belong to the World Documentary Heritage – just like the Gutenberg Bible from 1455 or the Magna Charta from 1215, for example. UWA researchers are analysing the palm-leaf manuscripts in collaboration with scientists from the Institut Français de Pondichéry (IFP) and the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore.