EAP1721 · ENDANGERED ARCHIVES PROGRAMME
From Epigraphic Data to Archival Regime
Armenian Inscriptions in India and the EAP1721 Digital Corpus
Hamest Tamrazyan
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Gayane Hovhannisyan
Yerevan State University (YSU)
Gravestone of Anna Cachkhatoon, Armenian Church of the Holy Nazareth, Kolkata
RESEARCH PROBLEM
How should inheriting institutions read a digital corpus?
Research question
How is colonial-era diaspora memory reorganised when it enters contemporary metadata infrastructures?
Thesis
EAP1721 is both a salvage record of endangered minority heritage and an archival regime shaped by standards, vocabularies, depositories and metadata fields.
“Colonial archive” is used analytically, not accusatorily: it names the representational effects of standards and custodial structures, not the intent of the project.
128
file-level records with images and bilingual descriptions
4
cities: Kolkata, Madras, Hyderabad, Mumbai
1641–1917
date range of the 118 dated inscriptions
3
digital depositories beyond the British Library EAP
2 / 10
THEORY → MODEL
Empirical archive versus archival regime
Empirical archive
What researchers consult
Archival regime
Through what the corpus circulates
“What remains tacit in a paper archive becomes declarative in a digital one.” The cost: ideological choices can appear as technical defaults. The gain: once encoded, they can be measured and revised.
Grounding
Stoler 2002
Archives as technologies of governance and classification
Mbembe 2002
Archives regulate what can be preserved and spoken
Derrida 1996
Consignation: gathering, ordering, authorising
Bowker & Star 2000
Classification as socio-technical infrastructure
Hamilton et al. 2002
Decolonising ≠ relocating documents
3 / 10
LITERATURE → CORPUS
Prior documentation and the place of EAP1721
1897 / 1937
M. J. Seth
History of the Armenians in India; Armenians in India. Funerary texts read as biographical witnesses of merchant families.
Parish work
Community records
Selective transcriptions by parishes and the Armenian Apostolic Church; no schema-validated cross-city database.
2011
S. Aslanian
New Julfa as a transregional trade network: Isfahan, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean.
2024
R. Kortoshyan
Most extensive recent printed corpus; indispensable for philological and historical work.
2026
EAP1721
EAP-standardised metadata corpus for preservation, search, comparison and infrastructure integration.
Methodological asymmetry. Merchant correspondence in European archives is catalogued and digitised; the inscriptions remain physically dispersed across Indian churches and cemeteries. EAP1721 complements printed epigraphy rather than replacing it.
4 / 10
EVIDENCE BASE
The pilot corpus: 128 inscriptions, four custodial sites
Records by city
Kolkata
1697–1917
75
Armenian Church of the Holy Nazareth
Madras
1706–1830
20
Armenian Church of St Mary
Hyderabad
1641–1869
18
Armenian Cemetery
Mumbai
1798–1900
15
Armenian Cemetery, Antop Hill
Two clusters: the late-Safavid New Julfa world (1670s–1790s) and the larger nineteenth-century colonial moment (peak 1840s–1860s). Ten undated records excluded; decades with no records shown as zero.
5 / 10
MODEL → METHOD
Method: a directed multi-layer network from the metadata
334
nodes
1,957
typed edges
9
node types
18
edge types
1
Workbook fields
Titles, Related Towns, Country of Origin, Locations of Original and Digital Copies, Gregorian date
2
Deterministic parsing
Regular expressions on English titles: “Gravestone of X, daughter of Y, wife of Z”
3
Typed edges
Multiple relations in one title yield multiple edges; weights record co-occurrence
4
Diagnostic graph
Bridges, singletons and dominant categories become properties of the schema itself
Only 2 subject and 2 language nodes: the thinness of the vocabulary is visible in the graph’s own shape.
6 / 10
IMPLEMENTATION
One record, one subgraph
Holy Nazareth, Kolkata
“Gravestone of Anna Cachkhatoon, wife of Owen Moses, daughter of Mariam Moses and granddaughter of Avetis Apgar”
commemorates
Inscription
Anna Cachkhatoon
Owen Moses
wife_of
Mariam Moses
daughter_of
Avetis Apgar
granddaughter_of
Kolkata
located_in_city
1900s
dated_to
Also: written_in → Armenian, English · held_at → custodial site · has_subject
7 / 10
EVIDENCE
Five diagnostics: how categories shape visibility
Geography
Isfahan and Julfa dominate related-town nodes, yet the country field links all 128 records to “Armenia”.
Anachronism for 17th-c. New Julfa merchants
Kinship
26 person-to-person edges, 5 relation types. Men via descent; women via fathers, husbands, widowhood.
Epigraphic convention silently inherited
Custodianship
7 institutional nodes, 3 digital depositories. Descendant communities appear only in acknowledgements.
Robust but socially narrow
Vocabulary
Two subject terms (“Burials”, “Diaspora”) and two languages for a multi-genre, Persianate corpus.
Genres and naming practices unstructured
Time
One Gregorian date field; production regimes (Safavid, Mughal, Deccan, EIC, Raj) are not expressible.
Chronology without history
8 / 10
IMPLICATIONS FOR LIBRARY PRACTICE
From diagnosis to practice: four extension layers
Current schema | Proposed extension layer | Analytical gain |
Modern country field | Temporally indexed historical geography: Safavid Iran, Mughal Empire, Persianate Deccan, EIC India, British India | Provenance without nation-state anachronism |
Kinship in titles / free text | Structured kinship fields, extended to Armenian titles and transcriptions | Family networks, gendered patterns, prosopography |
Institutional custodians only | Community-partner register with documented governance roles | Consent and local knowledge recorded as data |
Two LC subject terms | Project vocabulary over LC headings: epitaphs, memorial and donor plaques, bilingual, damaged or illegible | Genre-level retrieval with interoperability intact |
No redesign of the EAP schema. A declared, backward-compatible extension layer: modest technical effort, substantial conceptual gain — the archive describes the conditions under which inscriptions become data.
9 / 10
CONCLUSION
Two durations
Lithic duration
Stone survives across Safavid, Mughal, Company and Crown regimes.
Infrastructural duration
Metadata can outlive the stone, but inherits the political shape of its own time.
Schemas, vocabularies and custodial networks are not packaging around the archive; they are part of the archive itself. The network makes the regime measurable — and therefore revisable.
Next phase, 2026–2029
EAP1721 project: eap.bl.uk/project/EAP1721 · Network: hamesttamrazyan.github.io/eap1721-network