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“Dunhuang Manuscript Culture” explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the network of pre-modern routes known today collectively as the Silk Roads. The manuscripts have been discovered in 1900 in a sealed-off side-chamber of a Buddhist cave temple, where they had lain undisturbed for for almost nine hundred years. The discovery comprised tens of thousands of texts, written in over twenty different languages and scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and Sanskrit. This study centres around four groups of manuscripts from the mid-ninth to the late tenth centuries, a period when the region was an independent kingdom ruled by local families. The central argument is that the manuscripts attest to the unique cultural diversity of the region during this period, exhibiting—alongside obvious Chinese elements—the heavy influence of Central Asian cultures. As a result, it was much less ‘Chinese’ than commonly portrayed in modern scholarship. The book makes a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads.
The Cambridge University Press published (1945-1967) in six volumes Professor Bailey's transcriptions of Saka manuscripts found in Sin Kiang and Kansu (of the ancient kingdom of Khotan). They are central to any study of Old Iranian and the Iranian dialects; and they are also important for further understanding of the religious tradition in the sacred Avesta of the Zoroastrians, and for the history of the peoples of Central Asia generally. This 1979 dictionary represents the fulfilment of a plan formed in 1934 which required first the editing and transcription of the manuscripts, and then the slow elucidation of the whole corpus of texts. It contains a linguistic analysis and translation of all the Iranian words used in the texts. It is the necessary key to the understanding of the texts, to the mastery of the language itself, and to the linking of Khotan Saka into the Indo-European linguistic tradition.