སྐར་ཅུང། Skar Cung pillar inscription, transcription (rtf)
Authors/Creators
Description
སྐར་ཅུང། Skar Cung pillar inscription, transcription (rtf)
Notes (Old Tibetan)
Technical info (English)
Bodleian MS. Or. Richardson 47 fol. 316
Manuscript copies of Tibetan imperial pillar inscriptions, collected by Rig 'dzin Tshe dbang nor bu in the 18th century.
Tucci (1950) 69
Giuseppe Tucci, The Tombs of the Tibetan Kings (Roma: IsMEO, 1950), 69
H. E. Richardson, The sKar-Cung Inscription, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1 (1973): 12-20
H. E. Richardson, A Corpus of Early Tibetan Inscriptions (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1985).
Iwao, Kazushi, Hill, Nathan, Hoshi, Izumi, & Imaeda, Yoshiro. (2009). Old Tibetan Inscriptions. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3558996
Takeuchi, Tsuguhito. (1999). Zhang-zhung 語およびボン教関連チベット語文献の解析とデータベース化. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3595327
Walter & Beckwith (2010) 291-319
Walter, M., & Beckwith, C. The Dating and Interpretation of the Old Tibetan Inscriptions. Central Asiatic Journal 54, no. 2 (2010): 291-319.
Charles Manson and Nathan Hill, A Gter Ma of Negatives. H. E. Richardson's Photographic Negatives of Manuscript Copies of Tibetan Imperial Inscriptions Possibly Collected by Rig 'dzin Tshe dbang nor bu in the 18th Century CE, Recently Found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in Epigraphic Evidence in the Pre-modern Buddhist World, edited by Kurt Tropper (Wien : Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien, Universität Wien.
Methods (English)
The Kwa Chu temple discussed in Sørensen, Per K. (1994). The Mirror Illuminating the Royal Genealogies: Tibetan Buddhist Historiography : An Annotated Translation of the XIVth Century Tibetan Chronicle : rGyal rabs gsal bai me long. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3559806, p. 352, n. 1128. The listing of temples, some with names know in this inscription, is also discussed Ibid., p. 569.
The dynastic date is revisited and questioned in Tucci (1950) and again in Walter, M., & Beckwith, C. (2010). “The Dating and Interpretation of the Old Tibetan Inscriptions,” Central Asiatic Journal 54, no. 2: 291-319, see Bibliography above. However, the use of pronouns and other features shows this interpretation cannot be accepted in full.
Hill, Nathan W. (2017) "Tibetan first person singular pronouns,” Rocznik Orientalistyczny 70, no. 2: 161-169.
Technical info
Photographs appear at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: https://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk/tibet_methodology_Richardson.html
As of March 2026 the text is intact and readable. The content — a 2006 methodology note by Dr Mandy Sadan about Hugh Richardson's photographic collection — comes through cleanly.
Signs of digital decay
The page shows indicators of link rot and infrastructure aging:
- The British Museum link points to
thebritishmuseum.ac.uk, the museum's old domain (it moved tobritishmuseum.orgmore than a decade ago, suggesting the site has had little or no maintenance since it launched). - The Pitt Rivers Museum link uses
http://(nothttps://), another sign of an unmaintained codebase.
Risk picture
This is a classic GLAM digital heritage project from the mid-2000s: a fixed-term funded initiative (joint Pitt Rivers/British Museum) that produced a rich static site, published it, and then effectively left it running without ongoing curatorial or technical stewardship. Projects like this are vulnerable because:
- No evident active maintenance — nearly 20 years without updates is a substantial time for web infrastructure.
- Institutional dependencies — it relies on Oxford/Pitt Rivers hosting indefinitely, with no obvious migration path or backup access point (e.g. no mention of deposit in the UK Web Archive or a repository like the Archaeology Data Service).
- The underlying database — the site appears to be dynamically generated (note the
.php.htmlURLs on the home page), meaning if the server-side infrastructure fails, the content could vanish even if the institution intends to preserve it. - Images at particular risk — the photographic assets are the core scholarly value, but image servers are often dropped when hosting is rationalised.
- Internet archive Wayback Machine has captured the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20260104122319/https://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk/
Technical info (English)
Coordinates 29°39'15"N 91°5'29"E; 29.654167, 91.091389 །
Files
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Additional details
Related works
- Has metadata
- Dataset: http://purl.bdrc.io/resource/G3CN219 (URL)
- Has part
- Photo: https://web.archive.org/web/20260104122319/https://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk/ (URL)