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Volume 87 - Issue 3 - October 2024

Bulletin of SOAS Volume 87 - Issue 3 -
Contents

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Article

  • Middle Persian documents and the making of the Islamic fiscal system: problems and prospects

  • Thomas Benfey
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 February 2025, pp. 395-420
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  • This article charts a new course for the study of the Middle Persian documents from early Islamic Iran, which takes their early Islamic context into account more fully than has hitherto been done. This approach and its potential fruits for the study of early Islamic history are illustrated through an in-depth treatment of four seventh-century documents from the Qom region (previously edited and discussed by Dieter Weber), each of which contains a fiscal term that is apparently otherwise unattested in the documentary corpus. I show that the existing interpretations of these documents anachronistically project the fiscal terminology and structures of a later time into early Islamic Iran, and that these documents, considered in aggregate, suggest a certain course of development for the Islamic fiscal system in the post-Sasanian territories in the decades following the initial conquests: from broad and relatively unspecific impositions to more targeted exactions, based on increasingly detailed assessments.

  • On the question of domestic slaves in late medieval and early modern Zoroastrianism

  • Kiyan Foroutan
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    27 August 2024, pp. 421-445
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  • This article collects and analyses passages about male and female domestic slaves in the Persian Rivāyats. The Rivāyats consist of correspondence between Iranian and Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis) from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries ce. In these letters, Parsis sought the opinions of Iranian Zoroastrians on various doctrinal and ritual issues. The passages in question cover a range of subjects, including the issue of converting household slaves to Zoroastrianism, their participation in domestic religious ceremonies, the exposure of their dead bodies in the towers of silence, and marrying female slaves. These references to slaves challenge the conventional narrative that pre-modern Zoroastrians were oppressed, marginalized, and poor communities. This narrative has overshadowed these pieces of evidence and has caused them not to be studied seriously. This paper seeks to go beyond this traditional reconstruction by examining these texts based on their context. The passages reflect the actual socio-religious issues of Zoroastrians, especially Parsis, and demonstrate their participation in the slave-owning milieu of late medieval and early modern Gujarat and Iran rather than mere anachronistic elements or rhetorical tools reflecting a scholastic treatment of a defunct legal question.

  • Prasun historical linguistics: new etymologies and the fate of the Indo-Iranian morphemes *-am and *-ka-

  • Julian Kreidl
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 November 2024, pp. 447-459
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  • In this article, I touch on some lexical and morphological aspects of Prasun historical linguistics. I propose six new etymologies for Prasun words that have not been etymologized at all (üžóg “resin”, ćəwā́ “rhubarb”, wulóg “footprint”, žíma “tent, camp”) or differently (wuzógrog, zógrog “knee”, wuẓnúg, wuẓéŋ “salt”), and add further remarks to three words (üzǖ́ etc. “ice; cold”, lümī́, lümǖ́ “tail”, wəs “day”) with whose traditional etymologizations I basically agree. Furthermore, it is argued that the common epenthetic wu- ~ ü- and the final (usually) -u ~ -ü have the same origin and largely go back to the acc.sg.m/n, nom.sg.n *-am of the Indo-Iranian a-stems. Additionally, while the *-ka-suffix is present in all Nuristani languages in various functions, there is a noticeable split between Prasun, where *-ka- is added to many nouns of the inherited basic vocabulary while it is absent in the cognates in the other Nuristani languages.

  • Lost Turfan fragments from the Nachlass of W.B. Henning

  • Adam Benkato
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    18 September 2024, pp. 461-477
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  • During the Second World War, a number of manuscript fragments in Iranian languages from the Berlin Turfan collections were lost. Photographs of these fragments preserved in the Nachlass of Walter B. Henning bring to light their contents and fill gaps in the record of Turfan texts. These photographs are published here for the first time, together with a description of the fragments and their contents.

  • Action nouns in *-i̯a- and a new verbal stem *jsīn- “to kill” in Khotanese

  • Alessandro Del Tomba
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 November 2024, pp. 479-488
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  • This article addresses derivational issues related to palatalization in Khotanese, focusing on action nouns of the kīra- type (< *-i̯a-). It is argued that diachronic palatalization conforms to the rules of synchronic palatalization and that the origin of the hapax legomenon jsīna- “killing” (Z 13.124), which apparently violates these rules, needs to be interpreted differently. It is traced back to a reduplicated Indo-Iranian verbal stem *ǰa-ghn- (cf. Young Avestan jaɣn-) < Proto-Indo-European *gwhé-gwhn- “to strike repeatedly” → “to kill”. This stem is also reflected in the Khotanese gerundive jsīñaa- “to be killed” < *dzai̯n-i̯a- ← *dzaɣn- < Iranian *ǰa-gn-. The article contributes additional evidence supporting the development of the preconsonantal voiced velar fricative *ɣ into *i̯ in pre-Khotanese.

  • Replacing a pillar of Tibetan Buddhist historiography: on the redactions of the so-called Pillar Testament (bKa’-chems-ka-khol-ma)

  • Reinier Langelaar
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    18 September 2024, pp. 489-517
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  • This article explores the unmined textual history of one of Tibet's most influential historiographies, the Pillar Testament (bKa’-chems-ka-khol-ma), usually dated to the eleventh or the twelfth century. Drawing on previously known and unknown witnesses, the article compares a variety of narratives across most extant redactions. In doing so, it finds that the redaction chiefly consulted by scholars to date is an expanded and contaminated version that is notably later than previously assumed. Instead, another and heretofore largely neglected witness emerges as the most archaic extant redaction. The textual comparisons spotlight a wide range of alterations in the work's narratives and thus demonstrate how perceptions of early Tibetan historical episodes shifted over time. Such changes affected remembrance of Sino-Tibetan imperial relations, the origins of Buddhism and writing in Tibet and the genealogy of its emperors, among other things. The article concludes by critically discussing the witnesses’ dating and the hope we may place in the hunt for the work's illustrious but elusive original.

  • Redeeming the orphaned souls: fragments of a Mongolian translation from Khara-khoto

  • Imre Galambos
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    18 October 2024, pp. 519-532
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  • In 1983 and 1984, archaeologists excavated at the ruins of Khara-khoto, Inner Mongolia, about 3,000 fragments of handwritten and printed texts from the Yuan period (1271–1368). The texts were chiefly written in Chinese and Tangut but also included a handful of other languages. Among a small group of texts in Mongolian were fragments of a woodblock-printed book with illustrations, using the Uyghur script. The content of the text, as well as the presence of a few interlinear Chinese characters, made it clear that this was a translation of a Chinese work, probably of Daoist content. Because the folios were incomplete, the narrative framework of the text could only be reconstructed partially, which is also why the source text has not been identified so far. This article locates Chinese versions of the story and identifies one of them as the closest to that used by the translator. This, in turn, helps to improve our interpretation of the Mongolian fragments and provide background information for understanding the context of the text's circulation in the Khara-khoto region. My primary aim here is to engage with the original Chinese story, rather than the translation and its place in Mongolian literature.

  • Bai and Old Western Chinese

  • Lee Man Hei
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 September 2024, pp. 533-555
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  • Several scholars noted that the pronunciations of 天 “sky” tiān and 風 “wind” fēng in Bai appear to be akin to the western variants of the words attested in the paronomastic gloss dictionary Shìmíng 釋名. I will demonstrate in the current study that there are additional commonalities shared by both Bai and the ancient western dialect, termed Old Western Chinese (OWC) in this study. In both languages, one can identify words with zy- in Middle Chinese (MC) that are pronounced j-. Bai and Old Western Chinese use the same word (椹 shèn) for “fungus”. Furthermore, Old Chinese (OC) cluster *-p/t-s yields -t in both languages in lieu of yielding -j as observed in Middle Chinese. Last but not least, it appears that in both languages, words with *lˤ- (whence MC d-) and -ʔ (whence MC rising tone) are distinct from other words with d- in Middle Chinese. Hence, this paper puts the claim that Bai is akin to Old Western Chinese on a stronger footing. As a side note, judging from the fact that 四 “four” sì contains -t in Old Western Chinese and early Bai, its Old Chinese form most likely ends in *-[t]-s.

Reviews

  • Marcus Milwright: A Story of Islamic Art xii, 311 pp. London and New York: Routledge, 2024. ISBN 978 1 032 44815 2.

  • Barbara Brend
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    18 October 2024, pp. 564-565
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