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HOW THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS UNROLLED A 2,000-YEAR-OLD BUDDHIST SCROLL
“IT WAS THE MOST FRAGILE OBJECT WE HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED.”
by Sabrina Imbler December 12, 2019
How the Library of Congress Unrolled a 2,000-Year-Old Buddhist Scroll
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To unroll a millennia-old scroll, be careful how you breathe. Yasmeen Khan
In This Story
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It’s not easy being a 2,000-year-old Buddhist scroll. A slight gust of wind, a
particularly humid day, or even a simple exhalation could cause the scroll to
crack or crumble into pieces. To unroll a scroll this old is almost
unthinkable—but recently, conservators at the Library of Congress found
themselves with no other option. They wanted to read the words scrawled inside
the Gandhara scroll.
Before the scroll came to the library, it was buried for 2,000 years in a clay
jar in a Buddhist stupa, or dome-shaped shrine, in the ancient region of
Gandhara, now the Peshawar Valley in northern Afghanistan and Pakistan. The
high-altitude, arid climate kept it from crumbling until it was excavated in the
1990s. In 2005, conservators received the scroll in a Parker Pen box on a bed of
cotton. “It was the most fragile object we have ever encountered,” Holly
Krueger, a retired paper conservator at the library, writes in an email. A year
passed before the conservators felt ready to unfurl the scroll without
destroying it completely.
The Gandhara scroll arrived in remarkably mundane Parker Pen box. Holly Krueger
The scroll, which was radiocarbon dated to the first century B.C., is one of a
handful of surviving early Buddhist manuscripts from Gandhara, according to
Jonathan Loar, a South Asia specialist at the library. Gandhara, situated on the
Silk Road, served as a gateway to India, and the region’s monks are credited
with spreading Buddhism into Iran and China, Krueger writes in a 2008 paper in
The Book and Paper Group Annual. It was written in Gandhari, a language related
to Sanskrit, on birch bark, an ancient writing material that consists of thin
layers held together with a natural glue—almost like ancient phyllo pastry. “As
it ages, this glue breaks down, leaving the layers extremely vulnerable to
shattering with the slightest disturbance,” Krueger says, adding that a scroll
this unstable could have only survived in a jar.
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Krueger consulted conservators at the British Library, who had successfully
unrolled 30 scrolls, for their input. Without any ancient, coiled birch bark
laying around for a trial run, she practiced on a baked cigar roll, teasing
apart its wafer-thin layers with bamboo spatulas. “It was not as fragile as the
scroll proved to be,” Krueger says. A few days before the unrolling, the
conservators placed the scroll in a specially constructed, humidified chamber,
which softened the birch bark so it would not break upon contact.
The rolled scroll, resting on its bed of cotton. Holly Krueger
The actual unrolling happened in June, 2006, on a Saturday, to reduce the risk
of air currents created by coworkers and better control the humidity and
temperature of the library’s paper lab. Krueger was present with only two
others: Yasmeen Khan, a senior rare book conservator at the library, and Mark
Barnard, the chief conservator at the British Library. “One cannot underestimate
the nerves of steel required for such a project,” Krueger says. “We had only one
chance for success.”
Krueger and Barnard removed the scroll from its moist chamber and placed it on
top of a pane of borosilicate glass. One turn at a time, using bamboo spatulas,
they unfurled the birch bark, placing small glass weights on newly flat
sections. Each fresh turn revealed new fragments, which the conservators weighed
down to preserve their place in the text. If the scroll seemed on the verge of
cracking, a conservator would mist the air with a preservation pencil.
Krueger and Barnard held each fragment in place with a glass weight, complete
with a cloth handle so each could be easily removed. Yasmeen Khan
It was a dramatic and silent affair: Everyone took shallow, controlled breaths.
One misplaced exhale could scatter the scroll shards and render something
translatable into something lost. “I was doing the photography and informed the
conservators whenever I was going to move so that they would be prepared for air
movement and change,” Khan writes in an email. When the whole thing was laid
flat, Krueger and Barnard removed the glass weights and laid a second pane of
glass on the whole revealed scroll, pushing down tiny pieces that popped up with
the bamboo sticks.
Finally translated, the final scroll has no title, beginning, or end, but it
does retain around 75 to 80 percent of the original text—one of the
better-preserved Gandharan scrolls in existence, Loar says. It tells the story
of 15 seekers of enlightenment who came before and after Siddhārtha Gautama, the
sage living in the 5th or 6th century B.C. who became known as the Buddha.
“Repeating these names—verbally, mentally, and or in writing—is a powerful
practice,” Loar says, adding that it functioned as a meditative exercise.
A section of the newly digitized scroll. Library of Congress
Too fragile for public display, the scroll has been reburied—this time in a box
within the archives of the library. There’s also a drawer that holds all the
tiny bits of dust that sprung from the scroll during the unrolling. Conservators
now transport it around the library on a cart with vibration dampening to ease
its journey, Krueger says. But this past summer, the conservators digitized the
entire scroll, making it surprisingly easy to read a millennia-old account of
the lives of buddhas—that is, if you read Gandhari.
You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura
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