Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Ancient Books Manuscripts

In my recent web surfing, I found the British Library, which is digitalizing their collection of some of ancient books. This includes scans of beautiful Illuminated Manuscripts and other books like Leonardo's Notebook, Lindishfarne Gospel, a Sultan's copy of the Qur'an, and a copy of the Vajra (Diamond) Sutra. Many of the books, include text and audio remarks from the Curator on different sections of the book. And includes a magnifying glass for examining details (though not for the Diamond Sutra), and an interactive way of turning the pages (it's pretty cool). link....

Note: There's a cute addition, History of the England, written by Jane Austen.
Updated Note: There's an enhanced 2.0 version, which could be found here. You do need Windows Vista, Windows XP with .Net 3.0, or Quicksilver. link....

-------------------In addition,-------------------------------------
So, the scan of this Diamond Sutra Scroll was found in a sealed desert cave in Dunhuang, Chinese Central Asia, along with 40,000 other scrolls, hidden and perserved. Alone with carvings, statues, and paintings.

Here is the website that is the hub for Curator, Historians, with an emphasis on digitisation. It's called, The International Dunhuang Project (IDP), which is an interesintg website on its own.

This website seems to be rich with resources and links based on discovery from Dunhuang, but 2 image archive links I suggest is:

For the more limited image archive, but more User-friendly, Tour-like format, with Curator commentary, try: link

For high-res images database, try: link

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