An Old Khotanese Reader

Kurze Beschreibung

This reader contains the complete text of the Buddhist ‘Tale of Bhadra’, the second chapter of the Old Khotanese Book of Zambasta, accompanied by a translation, commentary and glossary. All morphological forms occurring in the text are identified in the glossary and in the introduction, which also includes a survey by Jonathan A. Silk of sources and parallels in other languages. The volume thus provides everything required to make this text accessible either to a student who has already worked through the ‘Introduction to Khotanese’ which forms the first part of R. E. Emmerick’s Handbook of Khotanese (BzI 51, 2024) or even to a complete beginner. It also contains substantial original material, particularly in the commentary and the etymological notes in the glossary, which will be of interest to specialists in Khotanese and in Iranian and Indo-European languages in general.

Autoreninfo

Nicholas Sims-Williams, born 1949 in Chatham, England, obtained his PhD at Cambridge in 1978 with a thesis on Christian texts in Sogdian. He joined the staff of SOAS University of London in 1976, becoming Emeritus Professor of Iranian and Central Asian Studies in 2015. He is a Fellow of several academies and similar bodies including the British Academy. In his research he focuses on the Middle Iranian languages of Afghanistan and Central Asia, taking an equal interest in the languages themselves, with their Indo-European roots, and in their Central Asian setting, with its stimulating mixture of languages, cultures and religions.

Reihentext

The series Beiträge zur Iranistik was founded in the 1960s by Georges Redard and subsequently edited by Nicholas Sims-Williams from 1997 to 2020; the present series editor is Agnes Korn.

The series publishes works on the languages of the Iranian branch of Indo-European. The focus is on linguistics, including grammars, dictionaries, text editions, philology as well as diachronic and synchronic studies of linguistic topics. Neighbouring fields such as literature, archaeology and anthropology are likewise represented. The languages of the series are English, German and French. The Beiträge zur Iranistik are represented in libraries internationally and are widely used standard works of Iranian studies.