Mitteliranische Handschriften, Teil l.

• Author: Sheffield, Daniel Jensen
• Position: Mitteliranische Handschriften, Teil l: Berliner Turfan-Fragmente Manichaischen Inhalts in Soghdischer Schrift - Book review

Mitteliranische Handschriften, Teil l: Berliner Turfan-fragmente manichaischen Inhalts in soghdischer Schrift. By CHRISTIANE RECK. Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland. Band XVIII, I. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 2006. Pp. 363.[member of]72.

The present volume is a well-produced catalogue of the Manichaean fragments written in the so-called Sogdian scrip] (as opposed to the Christian or Manichaean scripts). The manuscripts described are primarily found in the Berliner Turfansammlung, on permanent loan from the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften to the Oriental Department of the Staats-bibliothek zu Berlin. PreuBischer Kulturbesitz, along with fragments from several other collections, notably from the Otani collection in kyoto and from the Institut Vostokovednija in St. Petersburg. Together with the re cent digitization of the Berlin collection now available to the public at the Digitales Turfanarchiv (http://www.bbaw.de/bbaw/Forschung/Forschungsprojekte/turfanforschung/de/). this catalogue will greatly facilitate research in this important archive of primary sources for the Manichaean religion in Central Asia. The fragments described form part of a large collection recovered between 1902 and 1913 by the four German expeditions sent to the Turfan basin, located in the north eastern corner of what is today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. This is the second catalogue describing the Manichaean texts in the Berlin Turfan collection to appear in the Verzeichnis der orientalisthen Handschriften in Deutschland (VOHD) series (see also Jens Wilkens. Altturkische Handschriften, Teil 8: Manichaisch-turkische Texte der Berliner Turfan-summlung, VOHD XIII, 16) and the first of a projected three volumes that will describe all the Iranian fragments in the collection written in the so-called Sogdian script. It should be noted that, though these manuscripts are predominantly in the Sogdian language, the catalogue also describes fragments of other languages written in Sogdian script, such as Middle Persian and Parthian.

The catalogue contains 446 entries, in which individual fragments as well as manuscripts reconstructed from several fragments are described. The entries are limited to fragments that have an explicit or evident Manichaean provenance. Given the very fragmentary nature of many of these texts, the subject matter is often difficult to identify. In these cases, certain scribal conventions...