Pour une histoire de la Serinde: Le manicheisme parmi les peuples et religions d'Asie Centrale d 'apres les sources primaires.

• Author: Hansen, Valerie
• Position: Book Review

By XAVIER TREMBLAY. Veroffentlichungen der Kommission fur Iranistik, no. 28. Vienna: OSTERREICHENISCHEN AKADEMIE DER WlSSENSCHAFFEN, 2001. Pp. 337. E 70.20 (paper).

This book contains an enormous amount of information. The author's starting point is a good one: Turfan is well known as the find-spot for the world's largest repository of Manichean materials, but just how Manichean was it?

A single table illustrates the strengths of the book. Appendix C (p. 138) lists the languages and religions of Serindia (following Aurel Stein, the term indicates Chinese Central Asia) from the second century B.C. to the twelfth century A.D. On the left-hand side are thirty-two languages divided into columns labeled Christian, Manichean, Buddhist, Mazdean, and Jewish. The table has sixty-one footnotes that run forty-three pages. No specialist can afford to ignore this book, which offers the most detailed inventory of Central Asian primary sources published to date.

Still, the book will be hard going for the generalist interested in learning more about the Silk Road. Contrary to the book's title, this is not a history of Manicheism based on a close reading of primary sources. It provides almost no excerpts from the documents themselves. Instead, this book treats primary documents as archaeological artifacts to be dated on the basis of script and linguistic usage.

In the past many analysts, including those who catalogued the lion's share of the Manichean finds from Turfan (now housed in Berlin), have treated religious texts as timeless. Since the main importance of the texts was philological--not historical--the reasoning of the cataloguers went, the labels ("signatures") on the different texts were torn off and each document was assigned a new number (starting at M 1, for Manichean 1, and continuing upward to M 10,000). Of course these new numbers gave no hint as to where, or with which other documents, a given document had been found. Tremblay's approach provides a valuable corrective to past treatment of these materials.

The book addresses three questions: "1. Who was Manichean at Turfan? 2. Were the Manicheans numerous? And even 3. To what period are the texts dated?" (p. 11). Tremblay provides a capsule version of his replies: "1. Manicheism affected only a tiny elite of Sogdian merchants and a section of the Uighur court; 2. never a big success in Turfan, Manicheism did not rival Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity (which was marginally Melkite), or...