Researchers at the Kathmandu Heritage Lab have utilized a specialized neural network to transcribe and translate fragmentary 8th-century birch-bark manuscripts written in the rare Bhujimol script. The decoded texts reveal sophisticated Sanskrit treatises detailing early concepts of theoretical thermodynamics, including the behavior of heat transfer and thermal expansion in diverse metallic alloys.
The manuscripts describe experimental setups involving liquid-filled ceramic vessels used to measure the rate of cooling, suggesting a rigorous empirical approach to metallurgy. This discovery pushes back the timeline for organized scientific inquiry into heat dynamics in the Himalayan region, demonstrating that early medieval scholars possessed a quantitative understanding of physical properties long before similar theories were formalized in the West.