Manuscripts
Heritage, Manuscripts - Thursday, March 1, 2007 15:53 - 10 Comments
SRITE- Project for Preserving the Manuscripts of the Syrian Christians in India
Kerala is home for many thousands of Syriac, Malayalam, Malayanma, Kolezhuttu, Vattezhuttu manuscripts of older and more recent date belonging to the autochthonous communities of the St Thomas Christians. Because of the humid, tropical climate and other factors, these manuscripts are greatly endangered. SRITE is a complex international project, based on cooperation between Indian, German, Hungarian and American institutions, which aims at saving these manuscripts both in their content and in their physical reality. 
SRITE project is aimed in preserving the thousands Syriac, Malayalam, Malayanma, Kolezhuttu, Vattezhuttu manuscripts of older and more recent date. The project estimate is to cover over 1,000 heavily endangered Syriac manuscripts in Kerala. The key difference of this project is unrestricted “open access policy” that is, they will make the entire digitised material freely available via the internet, provided with the appropriate catalogue descriptions. At the same time, the benefits resulting from the publications are returned to the proprietors, on the condition that they spend the proceeds on the conservation of the original manuscripts, in their physical reality.
The collections are mixed; they contain Syriac, Malayalam and pre-Malayalam material, the whole belonging together. The manuscripts are written on paper or palm leaves. Besides manuscripts proper, we also have a rich collection of archival material in Syriac: documents pertaining to the relations of the Syrian Christians of India with their mother Churches in the Middle East, such as letters sent to and fro, official documents issued by Middle Eastern hierarchs, etc.
Some of these are available in the original, others in copies, often in letter books. This documentation begins in the early seventeenth century and ends in the twentieth century. The manuscripts proper often contain new texts, unknown from elsewhere. This material, once collected and processed, will permit us to write the hitherto unknown history of indigenous Christianity in southern India. Continue…
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Nasrani Syrian Christians NETWORK Snapshot
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Hi Joseph,
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Movie on St Thomas Christian is a great idea.Start with Alexander the Great ordering Syrian settlements in t...
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