Palaeographical Studies of Indian Manuscripts

The University of Vienna owns 220 valuable Indian manuscripts, most of which were brought to Vienna by Georg Bühler, the founder of Indology in Austria. They provided the basis for the research of the scientific staff member Dr. Velizar Sadovski (Austrian Academy of Sci-ences) who undertook extensive palaeographical studies of these manuscripts including the modern approach of graphemics. The original detailed concept of the project had to be re-stricted, with the approval of the Austrian Science Fund, soon after the beginning of the pro-ject work, because of a change in the career of the scientific staff member. The following fundamental results were subsequently obtained: The manuscripts were examined and those most suitable for representative studies of palaeography and graphemics were selected for the project work. A considerable quantity of the manuscripts explicitly mentions an original dating and can be associated with a defined area. Therefore they were apt to be used for representative palaeographical studies of a specific era and of a local tradition of the Devanðgar script respectively. Dr. Sadovski has determined the requisites for a methodical approach of modern graphemics and their application to Indian manuscripts. Furthermore he developed an all-embracing concept for a palaeographical, codicological and graphemical analysis of Indian manuscripts written in Devanðgar script as well as a sophisticated raster of distinctive features of the elements of the shape of characters. Such a utilisation of a raster has become a matter of course in the field of Byzantine-Hellenistic, Latin, or Slavonic palaeography. In the field of Indian palaeography it constitutes a trend-setting innovation.