Mitteliranische Handschriften, pt. 4: Iranian Manuscripts in Syriac Script in the Berlin Turfan Collection.

• Author: Barbati, Criara
• Position: Book review

Mitteliranische Handschriften, pt. 4: Iranian Manuscripts in Syriac Script in the Berlin Turfan Collection. By NICHOLAS SIMS-WILLIAMS. Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, vol. 18,4. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG. 2012. Pp. 249.

The catalogue of manuscript fragments in Iranian languages in Syriac script belonging to the Berlin Turfan collection edited by Nicholas Sims-Williams is more than welcome. It is the first complete catalogue of this collection after more than a century of studies on the collection itself. In fact, the Christian Iranian manuscript fragments taken into account in this catalogue were discovered by the second and third German Thrfan expeditions in 1904-1905 and in 1905-1907 respectively. This material--mostly in Sogdian with two exceptions in New Persian--comes from a Christian monastery at Shui-pang near Bulayki, approximately ten kilometers north of Mean, in present-day Xinjiang, Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.

The outstanding value of this catalogue is incontrovertible. Its author is one of the most prominent scholars of Middle Iranian languages and literatures in general and of Sogdian in particular. Nicholas Sims-Williams presents a catalogue that is a fundamental contribution to the field for many reasons. apart from its impeccable philological quality. First of all, as already pointed out, it is the first full record of this part of the Rem collection and therefore is extremely useful for every student of Christian Iranian literature. Second, with the corresponding catalogue of the Syriac manuscripts forthcoming from the same collection (Syriac Manuscripts in the Berlin Turfan Collection, ed. Erica Hunter and Mark Dickens), we will for the first time be able to gain a full picture of the extant record of the Christian communities in the Turfan oasis in the early Middle Ages. Last but not least, the catalogue is particularly noteworthy for its full recognition of codicological information, which still tends to be neglected. as I recently tried to demonstrate ("The Christian Mediaeval Iranian Codicology: An Unexplored Territory," Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Newsletter 5 [2013]: 7-9). In fact, while one used to find only scattered references to codicology in philological-linguistics studies, the catalogue under review allows us to make a very significant step towards a better knowledge of the codicological aspects of the Sogdian Christian fragments...