University of Hamburg sends unique container laboratory worldwide to India

The container laboratory consists of a total of seven containers, which include many different devices and laboratories. It was custom-made on behalf of the Excellence Cluster "Understanding Written Artefacts" at the University of Hamburg. (Photo: UHH/Esfandiari)

The palm leaf manuscripts to be examined in Puducherry, South India, belong to the world documentary heritage, just like the Gutenberg Bible (around 1455) or the Magna Carta of 1215. (Image: UHH/K. Helmholz)

To explore valuable manuscripts around the world, the Excellence Cluster "Understanding Written Artefacts" at the University of Hamburg has developed a mobile container laboratory. The total of seven containers will be sent abroad for the first time on April 7, 2024. In India, they aim to examine palm leaf manuscripts that are part of UNESCO's World Document Heritage over the next year and a half.

In Puducherry, southern India, around 12,000 unexplored palm leaf manuscripts are stored. They date from the late 18th and 19th centuries and are among the oldest preserved manuscripts of this kind. For historians, they are among the most important sources on religion, history, astrology, and medicine of a scriptural culture that is approximately two thousand years old and one of the most significant in the world.

However, because the exact origin of the manuscripts is almost always unknown, many questions remain open, such as the spread of certain religious cults. Researchers from the Excellence Cluster "Understanding Written Artefacts" (UWA) and scientists from India now want to jointly clarify some of these questions: through material scientific analyses of the manuscripts in a uniquely designed container laboratory. It consists of a total of seven containers. Five contain laboratory rooms, another provides power generators and water supplies, and a seventh serves as storage.

"We assemble the necessary equipment individually for this and any new deployment," says Prof. Dr. Markus Fischer, chemist and head of the container lab project at the University of Hamburg. Fischer was significantly involved in the development of the laboratory, which was custom-built according to the specifications of the Hamburg Excellence Cluster. It is equipped, for example, with a cleanroom for molecular biological work to identify the palm species whose leaves served as writing material. The unknown authors often wrote with a pigment made from rust. Identical rust particles or recurring DNA structures in palm leaves could indicate a common origin of different manuscripts.

Deployment in Heat and Heavy Rain

The conditions during the six-week sea voyage and the climate in southern India pose major challenges for the research. "In summer, the average temperature there exceeds 30 degrees Celsius, and in October, the monsoon begins with its extreme humidity. We have tested many devices here in Hamburg for their robustness and now hope they will perform well on site," Fischer explains.

The researcher will accompany the container laboratory for several weeks, as will two chemists from the University of Hamburg and the scientific director of the project, Indologist Dr. Giovanni Ciotti. "A major challenge is that only non-invasive or minimally invasive methods are suitable for examining the manuscripts. They are part of UNESCO's World Document Heritage. You can't just cut off a piece and put it under a microscope, so to speak," says Ciotti.

The documents are located on the grounds of the Institut Français and the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Puducherry. Since 2005, they have been part of the UNESCO World Document Heritage—along with, for example, the Gutenberg Bible of 1455 or the Magna Carta of 1215. The researchers from the UWA Excellence Cluster are conducting the examination of 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.