The third lecture in the Gandhāra Corpora Project Lecture Series was delivered by Dr. Stefan Baums from the University of Munich on June 18, 2025, and focused on the formation, structure, and analysis of a comprehensive corpus of Gāndhārī manuscripts and inscriptions within the database gandhari.org. Covering a time span of over 500 years—from the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century CE—the corpus includes inscriptions, manuscripts, documents, and coins, all written in the Kharoṣṭhī script, which serves as the main defining criterion for inclusion in the corpus. These materials trace the spread of Gāndhārī writing culture from Gandhāra across Central and South Asia, including as far east as Luoyang and Chang’an in China, where Indian expatriate Buddhist communities left their marks. Dr. Baums discussed methodological innovations such as high-resolution 3D visualization of relic inscriptions, and introduced digital tools like the READ software (Research Environment for Ansient Documents, available on GitHub) for analyzing ancient documents.
