See also http://idp.bl.uk/ which is the parent project and international frame of cooperation for similar texts, many of which remain untranslated despite being digitized. There is a fairly strong need for people to study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharosthi amongst other things. ML will probably help analyse the corpus eventually.
When I started reading the title, it quickly switched from a sports car to a digital preservation effort. Loved the effect of the radical change of expected subject on my brain.
“ The Stein collection contains over 1000 copies of the Lotus Sutra in Chinese, which were acquired by Sir Marc Aurel Stein in 1907 and 1914, when he visited the so-called ‘Library Cave’ (Cave 17) at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang, in the present-day Gansu Province in China.”
None of that seems like particularly nice behavior in retrospect. We could maybe also agree that the typical motivation behind taking things home was probably not to benevolently preserve historical records for future generations, although it’s nice that things worked out in this case.
> We could maybe also agree that the typical motivation behind taking things home was probably not to benevolently preserve historical records for future generations
Yes, colonisers take trophies home, all of them did and they still do and none of them do it with noble intents.
What does this add to the discourse? What is the purpose of singling out western colonisation as being specifically bad where there are so many other examples of colonisation to point that angry finger at? Humans are a belligerent species no matter the colour of their skin so this persistent push to chastise specifically western cultures for their wrongdoings in the past is both dishonest as well as irrational.
Take slavery as an example. The Atlantic slave trade is singled out for being the epitome of evil for which the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of those who look like part of the 2% of the population in the Americas who kept slaves are being chastised. There were black slave owners - the first (or one of the first, this seems to be disputed) officially licenced slave owner was black [1] - and there were Caucasian slaves and indentured servants. Those who survived enslavement form part of the base of the "African American" population which in total numbers around 13% of the population of the USA. Slavery is - not was, is - bad and with that is is clear this part of the history of those nations which participated in it should not be forgotten. And therein lies the crux: when talking about slavery the focus is nearly 100% on slavery as practised by Europeans and Americans. What about the even larger slave trade which went east instead of west with destinations in the Islamic world [2,3,4]? Those slaves did not leave many descendants since enslaved men were castrated. The trade continued long after the Atlantic slave trade was banned first by the British - who used their navy to enforce this ban - and later by other European nations? Also, why is the focus always on those who bought slaves but never on those who sold them in the first place? Those people were sold by others who looked exactly like them, people whose descendants still live in Africa and elsewhere. Why is the Barbary slave trade [5] hardly ever mentioned when this trade was both wide-spread as well as devastating for coastal communities in Europe where raiders sacked villages to capture people to be sold on the slave markets of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya. The slave trade finally ceased on the Barbary coast when European governments passed laws granting emancipation to slaves. Slavery continues to this day and is still part of Islamic law [6] as was made clear when the Islamic state openly held slave markets. In short, slavery is a human malice, not a western one. Why, then, single out the Atlantic slave trade as the one to focus on? Why single out specifically those countries which eventually got around to banning slave trade and enforcing that ban elsewhere as those who are most to blame? While the fact that they eventually saw the light does not wash their history clean it does put them above those groups which never banned the practice, especially when it is clear the eastern slave trade was bigger in all respects compared to the Atlantic trade - the practice started earlier, it continued when the Atlantic trade was abolished and it encompassed a much larger number of enslaved people.
The question to this "why" is clear: it is part of western culture to self-criticise. This is a good thing but it should not be abused nor should self-criticism keep one from seeing the same vices elsewhere. It should not be abused so as to paint western culture only in the light of its failings as is ever so popular in "progressive" circles.
Look at the message, not at the source. There are many more sources which give the same message - or at least a similar one given how as we're talking history.
