David E. Pingree (1933-2005) was a leading scholar on the transmission of the exact sciences in the ancient world. He worked extensively with primary sources written in a wide range of classical languages, including Akkadian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. Over the course of a long and productive career, he created an invaluable archive of manuscript copies currently stored in the John Hay Library at Brown University. The archive contains photocopies of several thousand manuscripts of key importance to the study of especially the astral sciences. The manuscripts were carefully selected from libraries, museums, and research institutions all over the world, many of which provide limited or no access to their collections today. The Pingree Collection is unique in curating an unparalleled selection of manuscripts on the astral sciences and gathering them together in a single archive.
The working group is constituted with the aim of making the archive available to researchers and ensure its continued use beyond the work of Pingree himself. The manuscript copies have been individually identified and described in a preliminary handlist, but remain available for on-site access only, with little guidance as to their actual contents. They will be digitized by the John Hay Library in collaboration with the Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia (ASTRA) research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG).
The digitized images and their associated metadata will be made available online and allow researchers to engage with and build upon the legacy of a globalized scientific community going back thousands of years.
A pilot project will be carried out from November 2024 to January 2025.
