Dwapara Yuga : A second renaissance

An article in the WSJ this week (extract below) details how new technology is opening up the analysis of ancient books and scrolls. Together with wider digitization efforts, we are seeing the Dwapara themes of expanding access to present knowledge and better understanding of previous ages that our Kali Yuga consciousness obscured.

"A cascade of groundbreaking discoveries in the past decade, unleashed by new technology, has stoked the sense of urgency [in scanning degenerating texts]. Multispectral imaging -- originally developed by NASA to capture satellite images through clouds -- has proved remarkably effective on everything from ancient papyrus scrolls to medieval manuscripts that were scraped off and written over when scribes recycled parchment pages. Using the technique, which captures high-resolution images in different light wavelengths, scholars can see details invisible to the naked eye: For example, infrared light highlights ink containing carbon from crushed charcoal, while ultraviolet light picks up ink containing iron.

Researchers in Baltimore discovered a veritable library of ancient texts hidden in the pages of a single 13th-century Greek prayer book, including an unknown commentary on Aristotle and two missing treatises by the Greek mathematician Archimedes.

Recently, multispectral imaging has gotten much less expensive, allowing researchers to take their equipment into the field. The next frontier, researchers say, is using CAT scan and X-ray technology to read brittle scrolls without even unrolling them.

This summer, a new project to decode ancient manuscripts with multispectral imaging will begin at the University of Michigan, Berkeley, and Columbia. The project, led by scholars from Brigham Young, will scan 400 papyrus pieces. Among the specimens: papyrus fragments from rolls that were stuffed inside mummified Egyptian crocodiles in the 1st century B.C., which are thought to contain ancient legal documents, contracts and perhaps literary works. Their efforts could reveal text that scholars have been laboring to read for decades, including a partially obscured play by Euripides.

"It's being called a second Renaissance," says Todd Hickey, a curator of papyri at the University of California, Berkeley, which has some 26,000 pieces of papyrus, many still unread. "It's revealing things that we didn't have a hope of reading in the past."

Dwapara Note

This blog is small effort to draw together sources around Dwapara Yuga. As recently as ten years ago, the whole field was restricted to a handful of individuals who had been very close to Yogananda, most of whom overlooked the importance of Dwapara Yuga, with research limited by access to photocopies of original documents, decades-old, out-of-print books and second or third hand recollections.