Reading Sessions of Campā Inscriptions

The Vietnam section of DHARMA’s Task-Force C (Southeast Asia) is holding weekly reading sessions of Old Cam inscriptions from Campā every Wednesday 10:00–12:30. The sessions’ organizers are Arlo Griffiths (EFEO Paris) and Salomé Pichon (EPHE).

C 106 Inscription

The sessions are designed to help us move forward in carrying out four tasks:

1. Checking published readings of inscriptions against any available estampages or photographs;
2. Editing the unpublished inscriptions of the corpus;
3. Translating the texts into English;
4. Encoding our readings and translations in EpiDoc-XML.

Campā, located in the center and the south of actual Vietnam, is the provenance region of about two hundreds and fifty inscriptions, datable from between the 5^th and 15^th centuries CE. The larger part of these inscriptions were composed between the 8^th and the 13^th century, in Cam and Sanskrit languages.

These sessions are intended to help us better understand the history and epigraphical practice of the region. Along with the study of the inscriptions, the Old Cam language in itself is a main point of focus of the seminar, which aims to deepen our understanding of its grammar and vocabulary.