More than 150 documents in Bactrian, the chief administrative language of pre-Islamic Afghanistan, have come to light during the last twenty-five years. These documents include letters, legal contracts, economic documents and a few Buddhist texts; many of them bear dates in the so-called "Bactrian era," which is also known from a few inscriptions, such as the Tochi valley inscriptions in Pakistan, but whose starting-point is controversial. The Bactrian documents have the potential to transform our knowledge of the history of the region during the 4th to 8th centuries CE, a period for which we have few contemporary records, but before they can be fully exploited as historical sources it is necessary to establish their relative and absolute chronology. The present volume aims to fulfil this need. In Part 1 we consider the dated documents, discussing the nature of the Bactrian calendar and the epoch of the Bactrian era, and concluding with a conspectus in which all the attested dates are converted to Julian dates on the basis of the facts and arguments presented. In Part 2 we turn to the equally important undated documents, systematically weighing up all types of evidence, whether historical, prosopographical, palaeographical, linguistic or orthographic, which may have a bearing on their dating. Part 3 provides a handy check-list of our conclusions, while the Appendices provide additional and supporting material including editions of the Tochi valley inscriptions and of a Pahlavi letter which was purchased together with the Bactrian documents. This book will be required reading for scholars and students of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic history of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. It will also be a useful resource for those interested in the languages, religions and numismatics of the region.

Studies in the Chronology of the Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan (Veroffentlichungen Zur Iranistik)

Business & Money

Sims-Williams, Nicholas

De Blois, Francois

Economics

Austrian Academy of Sciences

<p>Many works of Syriac literature, including some now lost, were translated into Sogdian, a language of the Iranian family. This Dictionary makes the whole material accessible to both Iranists and Syriacists, giving a full semantic and morphological analysis of the attested Christian Sogdian vocabulary. The first part, arranged by Sogdian lemmata, also indicates the various Syriac words which each Sogdian form translates, while the second part, arranged by Syriac lemmata, shows all possible ways of translating any Syriac word into Sogdian. A comprehensive English index adds to the utility of the work. Since the appearance of the first edition of this Dictionary in 2016, a series of major text-editions have completed the publication of the whole extant Christian Sogdian literature, making this the appropriate time for a new and complete edition of the Dictionary.</p>

A Dictionary: Christian Sogdian, Syriac and English (Beitrage Zur Iranistik, 41)

Reference

Dictionaries & Thesauruses

Reichert Verlag

The Book of Zambasta: Metre and Stress in Old Khotanese (Beitrage zur Iranistik, 49)

Words, Language & Grammar

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