Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan, I: Legal and Economic Documents.

• Author: Skjaervo, Prods Oktor
• Position: Book review

Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan, I: Legal and Economic Documents. By NICHOLAS SIMS-WILLIAMS. Studies in the Khalili Collection, vol. 3. Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, part II, vol. VI. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2000. Pp. 255.

It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the much-anticipated and speedy publication of the Bactrian documents from Afghanistan. The scholarly community has good reason to be grateful to the owners of the documents, especially Dr. Nasser David Khalili, to whom the majority of the documents belong, for permitting N. Sims-Williams to work on them and for agreeing to their publication. Most of all, the reviewer is impressed with the care, insight, and learning with which Sims-Williams has been able to produce what is probably going to be a standard edition for many years to come.

In 1989 there appeared what was assumed to remain an up-to-date survey of the Iranian languages: the Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum, ed. Rudiger Schmitt (Wiesbaden). Here, Sims-Williams's description of the Bactrian language covers no more than six pages, the sources being limited to a few stone inscriptions, some graffiti, eight leaves of a text in Greek cursive, and one leaf of a text in Manichean script. Ten years later, all this was changed. Not only had a long inscription been added to the corpus (the Rabatak inscription discovered in 1993: Nicholas Sims-Williams and Joe Cribb, "A New Bactrian Inscription of Kanishka the Great," Silk Road Art and Archaeology 4 [1995-96], 75-142), but a substantial number of documents written in Greek cursive and in Bactrian language, most of them on leather, a few on cloth and wood, many with their seals intact, had been surfacing on the antiquities market and begun coming to the attention of Iranists. Sims-Williams first reported at length on the new documents in his inaugural lecture (1 February 1996): New Lights on Ancient Afghanistan: The Decipherment of Bactrian (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, Univ. of London, 1977), and he also told the story of these discoveries in a presentation at the Ancient Orient Museum in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, 23 September 1998, on the occasion of being presented, jointly with Joe Cribb, with the Hirayama prize. (1) It was in 1991 that he first saw "photographs of a newly discovered Bactrian document on leather. The document was inscribed on both sides with twenty-eight lines in cursive Bactrian script, making it by far the most substantial example of cursive Bactrian so far known.... One such document was a revelation in itself. But it was as nothing compared to what was to come. Within five years the corpus of Bactrian documents had grown to a hundred, most of which are now in London, in the collection of Dr David Khalili." Sims-Williams published the first such document (here doc. F) in "A Bactrian Deed of Manumission," Silk Road Art and Archaeology 5 (1997/8 [pub. 1999]). A Bactrian marriage contract was the subject of several presentations from 1998 on; a discussion especially of the dating of the documents appeared as "From the Kushan-Shahs to the Arabs: New Bactrian Documents Dated in the Era of the Tochi Inscriptions," in Coins, Art, and Chronology: Essays on the Pre-Islamic History of the Indo-Iranian Borderlands, ed. Michael Alram and Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter (Vienna: Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999), and "Four Bactrian Economic Documents" was published in Bulletin of the Asia Institute 11 (1997 [pub. 2000]). An extensive survey of the language, contents, and socio-historical setting of the documents were the topic of his Ehsan Yarshater Distinguished Lectures on Iranian Studies at Harvard University in 2000. Unfortunately, these lectures remain unpublished, though mainly because of the large quantity of new material that has surfaced since then.

The present volume contains forty mostly complete documents reproduced in Greek script with translations. (Since the documents themselves are in Greek cursive, I do not quite see the advantage of using Greek standard print type, rather than roman transliteration, which would have rendered the original just as faithfully.) A second text volume and an accompanying plate volume are forthcoming. The volume also contains a list of the documents with descriptions, including date, document type, material description, and current location.

The collection contains all kinds of contracts and deeds, as well as receipts for goods received or delivered. Among them are legal documents regarding a variety of issues, such as marriage, slave purchase, manumission, purchase or lease of land (including vineyards), loans and repayment of loans, guarantees, gifts, and what the editor calls "undertaking to keep the peace," which are agreements between two parties that one will not litigate against the other. The marriage contract (doc. A) is the earliest of the dated documents and involves a woman engaged to marry two brothers. One particular interest of this contract is the similarity in terminology with known marriage contracts in Middle Persian and, especially, in Sogdian.

The documents are dated between 110 and 549, that is, assuming that the Bactrian era began in 233 C.E., between 342 and 781. In the present volume, the documents are conveniently arranged by date.

The geographic horizon of the documents is described by Sims-Williams (1998) as follows: "Several documents state that they were written in Samingan, Rob (modern Ruy), Malr or Madr, or Kah (modern Kah-mard). All four places are apparently within the jurisdiction of a ruler who is referred to in many documents as 'the khar of Rob'. On the other hand, Tarmid (or...