The volume under review contains two posthumous publications by the late Tocharologist and Indo-Europeanist Klaus T. Schmidt. The first part (pp. 1–159) contains the author's hitherto unpublished habilitation thesis from 1986, an edition of a Karmavācanā text in Tocharian B (with some text portions in Sanskrit), consisting of the fragments THT 1102–THT 1125. The text in question, an ordination ritual for Buddhist monks, is of immense importance to the study of Tocharian B, since, despite the fragmentary nature of the manuscript, it constitutes one of the longest continuous texts attested in the language. Following the introduction, the author provides a physical description of each individual manuscript fragment. The text itself is given in the form of a text rendition, in which the transcription is formatted according to the lines on the manuscript fragments, as well as a text edition, in which the transcription is presented continuously and furnished with additional text restorations. The transcriptions of the text are followed by a translation and a philological and linguistic commentary. The author further provides an overview and transcriptions of other Karmavācanā fragments in Tocharian B that are not part of the edited manuscript. The final two chapters deal with the relationship between Tocharian and the Iranian languages. The author shows how the Tocharian B text in question can improve our understanding of the attested parallel text in Tumshuq Saka and of the Tumshuq Saka language in general. The final chapter is a general discussion of the oldest Iranian loanwords in Tocharian. The back matter contains both a subject index and a word index.

All the components of the author's original habilitation thesis are present in this edition, with the exception of part of his chapter on Tumshuq Saka, which he had already published elsewhere. The overall quality of Schmidt's original text edition can only be considered exemplary. Due to the fragmentary state of the manuscript, the text can only be understood in comparison with the various parallel versions in other languages, including Sanskrit, Tumshuq Saka, and Chinese. The author proficiently employs these parallel versions in order to fill in many of the numerous gaps in the Tocharian B manuscript and to restore and translate large portions of the original text. Due to the importance of this text and the high quality of the edition, a published version of Schmidt's habilitation thesis has long been a desideratum. It is therefore especially unfortunate that the editing of this particular version of Schmidt's work is rather poor. It contains a staggering number of typographic errors, including (but not limited to) missing or wrong diacritics that change or obscure the meaning of word forms (e.g. śaulasontā for śaulasontä “reverend one”, pp. 26, 53) and missing opening or closing parentheses obscuring which portions of the transcribed text correspond to attested text and which ones are restored. Some hyphens that seem originally to have been meant to break a word across lines appear in the middle of a line, including cases within Tocharian forms, where the hyphen can be mistaken for a compound boundary (e.g. yentu-käñe for yentukäñe “Indian”, p. 123). In one case an example sentence has been attributed to the wrong manuscript fragment (THT 293 for THT 295, p. 120). What makes matters worse is that only a subset of the typographic errors and discrepancies between the two different text transcriptions that were present in the original version are remarked upon by the editor (in footnotes). As a result, a reader who only has access to the published version of the text has no way of knowing which errors/discrepancies can be attributed to the author and which were introduced during the editing process. Regrettably, all of these issues taken together make for a version of Schmidt's work that is only of limited use, as scholars will have to continue to consult a copy of the author's original manuscript for a faithful representation of his readings.

The second publication within the present volume (pp. 161–275) deals with a small corpus of manuscript fragments and wall inscriptions written in a special form of the Kharosthi alphabet and whose content or language has so far not been determined. The author attributes it to a hitherto unknown third Tocharian language, which he terms “Lolanisch” (henceforth Loulanic) after the geographic area of its use (Loulan/Kroraina). A short introduction is followed by an edition of the text corpus, including photographs, transcriptions, translations, and philological/linguistic commentaries. The entire corpus consists of roughly 260 word tokens (including word fragments and individual compound members). Only three of the ten discussed documents contain text portions of more than ten words uninterrupted by lacunae: a set of instructions for performing magic (69 Loulanic word tokens), and two wall inscriptions (25 and 29 word tokens). The text edition is followed by a fragment of a Loulanic grammar, a Loulanic–German dictionary, and a word index. Should the author's thesis prove to be correct, it would confirm the hypothesis of T. Burrow (“Tokharian elements in the Kharoṣṭhī documents from Chinese Turkestan”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 67, 1935, pp. 667–75) that a form of Tocharian was spoken in the geographic region of Loulan based on loanwords in Niya Prakrit, although Burrow's work does not come up in the text. A detailed evaluation of Schmidt's proposal will occupy the scholarly community for quite some time and is well beyond the scope of the present format. What can be said here is that despite the author's ingenious ability to provide full translations of the better preserved documents, many of his interpretations and grammatical analyses are highly speculative and based on precious little data, even if we take his readings of the Kharosthi characters at face value. In addition, participants of the workshop Schmidt's Lolanisch Hypothesis (14–16 September 2019, University of Leiden) deemed Schmidt's overall readings of the Kharosthi characters “highly unlikely” (Hannes A. Fellner, p.c.). It therefore appears doubtful at the time of writing that Schmidt's proposal of a third Tocharian language will hold up to scrutiny.