Precious Treasures from the Diamond Throne

Sam van Schaik is a specialist in Tibetan Buddhism and is the head of the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library. Before this he was a principal investigator on the ERC project Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State. He is the author of several books including Tibet: A History, Tibetan Zen and Buddhist Magic.

Daniela De Simone is an archaeologist and a museum curator. She studied Indian languages and cultures at L’Orientale, University of Naples. Daniela was a researcher of the ERC project Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State and curated the British Museum’s permanent exhibit of South Asian archaeological materials. Before this, she was Assistant Programme Specialist at UNESCO New Delhi and Field Director of the Italian Archaeological Mission to Nepal for the Italian Institute for Africa and the Orient.

Gergely Hidas completed a DPhil in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. Between 2014 and 2019 he worked as a team member of the Beyond Boundaries project at the British Museum. He is the author of Mahāpratisarā-Mahāvidyārājñī: The Great Amulet, Great Queen of Spells (Aditya Prakashan, 2012), A Buddhist Ritual Manual on Agriculture: Vajratuṇḍasamayakalparāja (De Gruyter, 2019) and Powers of Protection: the Buddhist Tradition of Spells in the Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha Collections (De Gruyter, 2021).

Michael Willis is leading Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State, a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) that is based in the British Museum, the British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies. He is the author of The Archaeology of Hindu Ritual: Temples and the Establishment of the Gods (Cambridge, 2009) and a number of other books on Indian art, archaeology and history.