Invisible East Digital Corpus

At Invisible East, our mission is to digitize a large corpus of long-neglected texts dating from the 8th to the 13th centuries and originating from Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia. Together, these texts offer a new and exciting history of the region; This is a history told not through kings and palaces, but through the daily lives of ordinary people—their families, communities, professions, and beliefs. These manuscripts, written in languages ​​such as Neo-Persian, Judeo-Persian, Middle Persian, Arabic, Bactrian, Sogdian, Khotanese, and Sanskrit, range from bill of sale to legal acts, edicts, petitions, marriage certificates, and personal letters. Our aim is to combine this wide range of texts into a single, public database, shedding new light on a region, period and population that has remained 'invisible' for too long. Unfortunately, the provenance of some of the texts digitized here is unclear; This is symptomatic of the difficulties faced by people in Afghanistan and other countries in the region in managing heritage, particularly those in Afghanistan, which has been plagued by decades of conflict and poverty. This creates an ethical dilemma for us researchers as we do not want to legitimize or encourage the purchase of materials of uncertain origin. Therefore, the IEDC (Invisible East Digital Corpus) only contains materials that are already in the public domain. Our aim is to make the public domain more accessible online to people in the regions where they originate, as well as to the broader scientific community and the general public. At the same time, we applaud and support to the best of our ability all efforts to preserve and preserve historical texts and manuscripts, in line with the national plans and priorities of the affected countries in the region.