This article marks the first instalment of a study examining the palaeography and phonology of rr and r in Khotanese. The palaeographic origin of the former has long been debated. Initially transliterated as < rr > by Ernst Leumann, its emergence as a ligature of two rs has been challenged by modern scholars. This study adopts a comprehensive approach, integrating palaeography, orthography, and linguistic classification. It traces the development of these graphemes from their earliest attested forms in manuscripts written in Archaic Orthography and Early Turkestan Br & amacr;hmi types 1 and 2, as well as other early script types. The investigation spans six centuries, charting the evolution of both the Book and Documentary Scripts of Khotanese. The study incudes a comparative analysis with other Central Asian Br & amacr;hmi scripts, particularly those used for Sanskrit and Tocharian. The findings support the claim that < rr > is indeed a ligature and reveal that there was no dependent as the second component of ligatures in Khotanese Br & amacr;hmi. Instead, two distinct variants of dependent emerged in southern Turkestan Br & amacr;hmi, both of which became integral to the Khotanese script. Through this palaeographic investigation, the evolution and specific uses of rr and r in various contexts are documented, providing new insights into the writing traditions of Khotanese Br & amacr;hmi over time.
From the Yuan to the Qing dynasties, Europeans wrote various notes concerning the use of official seals in everyday life: seals on doors and packaging, or court seals. It was not until the Kangxi (1662-1722) and Yongzheng (1723-1735) eras that two Jesuits were able to describe the system of imperial and official seals with any degree of precision. The first was the Portuguese Gabriel de Magaillans (1609-1677), who manufactured and maintained European clocks and astronomical instruments at the court of Beijing and was the author of the Nouvelle relation de la Chine, published in 1688. The second was Jean-Baptiste du Halde (1674-1743), who edited the Lettres & eacute;difiantes et curieuses from Paris and published the Description de la Chine in 1735. Both devoted one or two pages to the system of seals, both imperial and administrative. However, du Halde was also interested in ancient coins, archaic inscriptions and a Ming banknote bearing an official seal, for which Fran & ccedil;ois-Xavier d'Entrecolles (1664-1741) was his main source of information. While their data are basically accurate when interpreting elaborate and minute regulations, these scholars couldn't avoid some mistakes or looseness. Each author retains his own style and priorities, which gives the two descriptions a different tone.
This article provides a new etymology of the name of the Rouran, or Ruanruan (330 AD-555 AD), which is attested in Chinese dynastic histories as *Nunar/*Nunan (sic), *Nonnor/*Nonnon (sic), *Noinoi (sic), *Nunor/*Nunon (sic), *Nono (sic). The author connects this name with Khitan *naw '(younger) sibling; younger relative' and Proto-Mongolic *nuxu/n, the Tabghach cognate of which can be regularly reconstructed as *nu or *no. A conclusion is made that this *nu similar to *no was borrowed from Tabghach by the Rouran for their self-name, which fits perfectly for a term reflecting their claim for a common origin with the Northern Wei emperors. The forms *Nunar/*Nunan, *Nonnor/*Nonnon, and *Nunor/*Nunon may be analyzed as *nu similar to *no 'younger sibling; younger relative' plus the plural suffix *+nar/*+nan or *+nor/*+non. The forms *Nono and *Noinoi appear to be reduplications that are occasionally observed in Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages as an expression of plurality, collectivity, or distributiveness.
This paper explores the role of Syriac Christian clergy networks in facilitating the exchange of technical and scientific knowledge between the Middle East, Central Asia, and Tang China. A striking example is the presentation of ingenious devices by Persian Christian monks at the Tang court at the beginning of the eighth century. This episode is significant for several reasons. First, it demonstrates that the Christian networks were not limited to the spread of religious ideas but also transmitted technical expertise. Second, it raises questions about the use of mechanical devices for religious and missionary purposes. Finally, it provides evidence for the circulation of mechanical science in the late antique and early medieval Middle East and Central Asia, despite the limited availability of literary, iconographic, and archaeological sources.
The paper discusses a range of philosophical concepts, considered fundamental in Western philosophy, such as being, substance, essence and identity (numerical identity and self-identity) the way they are (in)applicable to Buddhist Idealist (Yog & amacr;c & amacr;ra) philosophy. The paper also analyses a possible correspondence of the concepts and analogous terms in Western and Indian philosophies and points to their very problematic overlap. The analysis focuses on works written by or ascribed to Vasubandhu as a Yog & amacr;c & amacr;ra teacher, and discusses the various shades of the ideas of anti-substantialism, anti-essentialism, contingent causality and emptiness developed within the framework of idealist, monist model of ontology. Is it possible for Yog & amacr;c & amacr;ra to find a secure foundation for knowledge of what ultimately exists? Certainly, any kind of the first-person account, involving epistemic (subject-object) dualism, of the traditional cogito, ergo sum will not do.
The city of Mari (Tel al-Hariri) was distinguished by being one of the most important cities that appeared in the time of the Old Babylonian period. It is currently located on the Iraqi-Syrian border, in the Albukamal area. It is a small settlement located on the bank of the Euphrates River. This city, like the other cities of ancient Mesopotamia, had its own pantheon of gods; it is different from that of the other Syrian cities, as the pantheon of gods consists of three main deities, It & umacr;r-mer, Dagan and I & scaron;tar, which is the well-known Mesopotamian system consisting of three gods, two males and a female goddess. Several studies have focused in particular on the god It & umacr;r-mer, whose cult is very localised in Mari. This research aims to confirm his nature, position and importance in the pantheon of the city of Mari, and to shed light on the roles of this god, based on the cuneiform texts found at Mari.
One of the earliest appearances of seals on cuneiform texts, whether stamp or cylinder seals, dates back to the Jamdat Nasr period, as they were found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur.1 They became widely common in the Ur III period, which is the period of explosion in the use of seals on texts,2 and subsequent periods. Some various scenes were executed on it according to the features of each period, because every period had its own characteristics, in addition to the fact that some of these seal impressions contained some lines of cuneiform writings giving the name of the owner of the seal and his profession and sometimes the name of the king or the god, or some dedicatory phrases to them. In the Middle Assyrian period, it was common for cylinder seals to be used for several cuneiform texts (such as economic, administrative and legal documentation, including sales and purchase contracts, loans...). So, the texts of this period (especially the texts of Nuzi period) were distinguished by the presence of one seal impression, or of two seal impressions, and sometimes more than that; all of them appeared on the obverse and reverse, or sometimes on the left edges of the texts. In addition, the scenes of these seal impressions were varied and included representations of deities and their symbols, of worship, of opposite with faces or opposite with back for animals with the sacred tree, or of the struggle of animals. The importance of this study lies in the fact that the cylinder seals were impressed on a group of cuneiform texts that were discovered at the site of Tell Al-Fahhar (Kuruhanni), which was studied here for the first time in the form of a comparative artistic study and we did not find such detailed studies for the same group, except for some few references.3 The study of seals is one of the important studies that can be used to determine the artistic elements that appeared in each period, and through which it is possible to accurately determine their dating and a comparative study can be used to identify the Mesopotamian, Hurrian, Mitanni or Assyrian elements which appeared in these seal impressions.
The paper offers a sociolinguistic reconstruction of the Slavic language as used by the Slavic (saqlabi) slaves in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) and Ifriqiyah (North Africa) in the 9th through the 11th century. Transshipped from the Balkans and East-Central Europe, the saqlabi slaves went through cultural and linguistic assimilation as a result of distant (outside the primary habitat of the Slavs) and historically short-term contact with local Arabic culture and language. Despite heavy assimilation, the saqlabi slaves might retain ethnolinguistic group (tribal) identity and created a kind of linguistic hybrid, called here Slavo-Arabic. While summarizing the findings of his predecessors, the author treats Slavo-Arabic as a secretive and relexified language in the making. Some typological parallels with Judeo-Arabic and other mixed languages in the Afro-Asian Arabic-speaking world are discussed with an eye to shedding a new light on the linguistic history of Slavs in the Muslim Mediterranean ecumene and beyond.
For those familiar with Chinese Buddhist canonical texts, it is widely known that many s & umacr;tra scriptures' titles begin with the phrase Fo shuo ((sic)(meaning 'preached by the Buddha' or 'expounded by the Buddha'), which highlights that the scripture was delivered by the Buddha himself. This feature is not found in Indic Buddhist texts (Pali, Sanskrit, G & amacr;ndh & amacr;r & imacr; and Tibetan translations of Indic Buddhist texts). Identifying the reasons behind this unique phenomenon requires examining complex issues related to the concept of authenticity in Indian and Chinese Buddhism. This brief article only focuses on tracing the earliest occurrences of the Fo shuo title, the primary patterns of its dissemination, and the influence of this practice. It shows that the Fo shuo titles in Chinese Buddhist scriptures can be traced back to at least the early fifth century, and the inclusion of the phrase Fo shuo in the titles is not a consistent practice.
Chapter "Shi ji" in the Yi Zhou shu contains a record of 28 unsuccessful ruling lineages from the past, and a version of this text is also attested in the Dunhuang manuscript of the Liu tao. The text's peculiar way of recording history as a collection of disjointed didactic precedents corresponds to what has been discussed in scholarship as "exemplary history", which served to promote the interests of subordinate elites in their negotiations with hereditary rulers. This style of history-writing is connected to the text's self-presentation as an efficacious ritual artefact, purportedly inherited from the Western Zhou court scribes but almost certainly created by the Warring States textual experts. The similarity between the text's title in the Yi Zhou shu and Sima Qian's monumental composition suggest that both may be influenced by the same mythology of empowering textual knowledge transmitted via the traditions of ancient court scribes.
In 1973, Gerhard Haeny discovered a stela of Horemheb in the temple of Amenhotep III at Kom el-Hettan, dated to Year 6 of his reign, in the inscription of which the king commemorates the construction of a ramp. This article proposes a new reconstruction of the inscription, on the basis of which the aspects left unsolved by the discoverer because of the lacunae are discussed: its exact date, the titulary of the king and the divinities to whom the ramp is dedicated.
The earliest attestation of a *Vimalaprabhapariprccha (Vp) appears in the lHan dkar catalogue of the Tibetan tranlations kept at the imperial residence of lHan dkar (date of composition c. eighth to early ninth c. AD). The framework narrating the previous lifes of its heroine construes her forgotten pedigree in maieutic coordination with the regional context, and informs the reader about the political and royal genealogy linking the region of Li yul (Khotan) with the neighboring kinglets of Bru zha (Gilgit) and sKar do in sBal ti (Baltistan). The manuscripts and objets d'art discovered in these regions, as well as the rock inscriptions of the Upper Indus regions and ethnographic reports, resonate with the veiled narrative of the Vimalaprabhapariprccha, whose action extends far beyond to U'rgyan (Swat), Sa' 'dzin (= Gandhara), Ka spar (Kasmir), and possibly also to the Iranian borders. The text refers to the period in which the Tibetans took control twice over part of these regions, including the territory of the Palola Sahi, a local dynasty of petty kings sporting an impressive titulature and royal names pretending to show ancient link with the Gupta rulers. This is the case with Palola Sahi Nandivikramadityanandi whose bronze, dedicated on April 26 or 27, 714 AD, offers interesting clues contributing to characterize the Buddhist community of Gilgit to whom a copy of the ordonnance (bka' tshig) of Khri srong lde btsan, officially acknowledging the Buddhist religion and dating to 779 AD, was sent.
Despite the numerous descriptions of the S & amacr;maveda songs, their contextualization within the ritual remains to be described. They are more important in that they never constitute an isolated unit, but are coordinated with the recited verses of the Rgveda. However, if singing and reciting are clearly distinguished, their relationship is more difficult to define when studied in the sacred context of the morning pressing of the Agnistoma, as it uses only two musical notes, unlike the other two pressings which use the entire heptatonic scale. Although Vedic exegetical texts are not very explicit, and the most recent musicological studies focus on Abrahamic religions, a comparison of these resources suggests that this first pressing is much more archaic than what tradition has indicated up to this day.
The primary purpose of the present study is to demonstrate that the donor language of the Turkic loanwords in Hungarian that exhibit sz-[s] in place of the Common Turkic y-was not an Old Bulgar dialect, but an ancient Oguric branch of Turkic with a history that is far older than previously assumed. The antiquity of this Turkic language, called "S-Turkic" by the author, is mainly proven by numerous Turkic loanwords in languages such as Mongolic, Khitan, Samoyedic, Chinese, and Tocharian. In the paper, each of these loanwords has been presented one by one and discussed in detail.
Maurice Courant's Bibliographie cor & eacute;enne has been an essential reference in the field of ancient Korean books for more than 100 years. It still contains many mysteries. The letters exchanged between Maurice Courant and Victor Collin de Plancy and the foreword to the Bibliographie both indicate how much this work owes to the latter. Collin is indeed credited with the first idea of the Bibliographie and collaborated on about a third of the first volume... However, only Maurice Courant signed this masterful work. Why this modesty of Collin de Plancy? On the other hand, a strangeness has long intrigued Korean researchers who have been interested in the organization of the Bibliographie cor & eacute;enne. This does not respect the traditional organization of "Chinese-style" bibliographic catalogs, which followed the kyongsajajip system, which arranged the classics, the masters' books, the history works and finally the collections. The examination of Collin's youthful passions, his long frequentation of catalogs and inventories, scientific or librarianship, make it possible to partially resolve the question of the origins of the Bibliographie cor & eacute;enne.
This article examines and provides a comprehensive translation of the Act of Ownership (mulk-name) of Sultan Suleyman for the princes of Kurdistan, a pivotal document for understanding the relationships between the Ottoman Empire and the Kurdish principalities in the sixteenth century. It demonstrates that the Act of Ownership, transcending merely acknowledging the privileges of political autonomy, tax immunity and territorial inalienability of the Kurdish principalities, establishes a contractual framework based on indefectible loyalty to the Empire. By contrasting this document with pre-existing imperial decrees of perpetual grants (soyurgals), the article reveals how Sultan Suleyman adapted existing political traditions to bolster Ottoman legitimacy and expand its influence in Kurdistan. The document establishes Kurdistan as a political space coextensive with the Empire (muzafat-i memalik-i mahruse), where the Sultan's authority overlays but does not replace that of the Kurdish princes. The article also highlights the strategic significance of this document within the context of Suleyman's anti-Safavid policy, particularly to strengthen Ottoman influence in the Zagros Mountains region in anticipation of future military campaigns. Thus, the Act of Ownership emerges as a major political instrument for the integration of the Kurdish principalities into the Empire, establishing the administrative category of the hukumet (principality), which persisted until the nineteenth century.
This note reports on the speech presented to the Asian Society at its meeting on January 20, 2023. It focuses on the influences and borrowings that define the fortified architectures developed in particular during the Parth-Sassanid periods in the Persian space. The purpose here is to draw up a state of knowledge on these fortified phenomena in Iran, from the first millennium BC to the end of the first millennium AD.
This article follows the one on the unit na:r day published in the previous volume of the Journal Asiatique. The approach to the data and their exposure is almost identical. The relationship established in this first article between the socio-cultural upheavals described by Condominas and Gu & eacute;rin and the existence of a double system of linguistic conceptualization of time are confirmed here. I won't repeat it. We will carry out a description parallel to that made for na:r, in conclusion we will note the similarity, at the linguistic level, of the sequences composing the two modes of conceptualization here called traditional system and modern system in the both of the units described as well as the particularities relating to the relationship between holonym and meronym.
This paper examines the areal distribution of the main color terms in the modern Indo-European languages of Asia, that is, in Armenian and Indo-Iranian. For Iranian, we examined color terms in New Persian and Pashto, in addition to previous forms attested in Old Persian, Avestan, Middle Persian, Sogdian, etc. For Indic, we analyzed color terms in Kashmiri, Nepali, Panjabi, Gujarati, Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Konkani, Sinhala, and Romani, besides more ancient lexemes attested in Old Indic and Middle Indic. For most of these languages the semantic field of color is virtually unexplored. We had therefore to build our own database by consulting lexica and by interviewing native speakers. Our results allowed to identify precise isoglosses, based on inheritance or on contact, in the diffusion of color terms in different languages. We saw, for example, that the areal diffusion of a color term often reflects the cultural importance of objects characterized by that color in a speech community. We can often reconstruct the spread of color terms according to routes of trade and ideas. Religion turns out to be of paramount importance in the distribution of color terms in the Indo-European languages of Asia, as different terms derived from Old Indic, Persian or Arabic circulate differently in languages mainly spoken by Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim communities. We also saw that different color categories are related to different rituals and ceremonies. All this goes against traditional assumptions on linguistic space according to geographical features of center, peripheries, presence of islands, mountains, etc. We rather purport a view of areal patterns that reflect historical, cultural, and social phenomena. Besides its empirical significance, our study can therefore offer some insights on the theory of historical language contact.
