Discoveries in Western Tibet and the Western Himalayas: Essays on History, Literature, Archaeology and Art. Piats 2003: Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Oxford, 2003.

• Author: Luczanits, Christian
• Position: Book review

Discoveries in Western Tibet and the Western Himalayas: Essays on History, Literature, Archaeology and Art. Piats 2003: Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Oxford, 2003. Edited by AMY HELLER and GIACOMELLA OROFINO. Brill's Tibetan Studies Library, vol. 10/8. Leiden: BRILL, 2007. Pp. x + 240, maps, plates, and figs. $107.

Recent research increasingly establishes the distinctiveness of the cultures in the Western Himalayan regions within the Tibetan cultural sphere. This is not only true for the historically largely independent region of Ladakh, or currently peripheral regions of Tibetan culture such as Kinnaur, but also for those on the West Tibetan plateau itself and thus within the present-day Autonomous Region of Tibet. The contributions to the volume--resulting from a panel organized by the editors at the 2003 Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies at Oxford University--represent a further step in defining this distinctiveness in greater detail. The three sections in which the essays are organized, namely archeology and art, literature, and history, convey the wide range of subjects covered. The distinctiveness of the Western Himalayan region may well go back to the enigmatic kingdom of Zhang zhung, which is the subject of Mark Aldenderfer, who had the chance to excavate archeologically in West Tibet. On the basis of the meager finds at a site called Dindun, in the vicinity of the well-known cave sites of Piyang and Dung dkar (as spelled by the author), Aldenderfer attempts to define Zhang zhung ethnicity from an archeological perspective. The site comprises an area of village houses and three graves and is datable to the period of 500-100 B.C. Taking it as representative of Zhang zhung, and comparing the house and grave typologies found there with those reported from other sites--from the trans-Himalayan region, e.g., the German excavations in Mustang, to the Byang thang plateau, the latter extensively surveyed by John Vincent Bellezza--the resulting definition is still a very narrow one, but it may well provide a nucleus for a better understanding of the early archeological evidence in the region, especially once more of the archeological sites can be dated.

With the establishment of the Purang Guge kingdom in the second half of the tenth century the region became a center of Buddhism. Three articles focus on the architectural and artistic evidence of the first flourishing of Buddhism in the region from the tenth to the thirteenth century. In a methodologically highly problematic paper, Gerald Kozicz analyzes two temples of the Nyar ma ruins in Ladakh. Founded in the late tenth...