ARTICLE ABSTRACTS

By Author

Adams, Douglas
  • "The Position of Tocharian Among the Other Indo-European bs Languages", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 104.3, 1984
    Abstract: The placement of Tocharian vis-a-vis the other Indo-European groups has been something of a problem; those who have investigated the issue over the past seventy-five years have, on the basis of very limited evidence, come to a variety of conclusions. An investigation here of the phonological, morphological, and lexical isoglosses (and especially the latter) uniting Tocharian with other Indo-European language families leads to the grouping of Tocharian with Meillet's "Northwestern" group in the first instance, with particularly close ties with Germanic. The ties Tocharian has with both Greek and Indic outside of the Northwestern group reflect later contacts on the part of the pre-Tocharians with the pre-Greeks and pre-Indics as the pre-Tocharians moved progressively eastward in the late Proto-Indo-European world.

    • Barber, E.J.W.
  • "A Weaver's Eye View of the Second Millennium Tarim Basin Finds", Journal of Indo-European Studies, Fall/Winter 1995, Volume 23, Numbers 3 & 4, pp. 347-355
    Abstract:

    • Barber, Paul T.
  • "Mummification in the Tarim Basin", Journal of Indo-European Studies, Fall/Winter 1995, Volume 23, Numbers 3 & 4, pp. 309-317
    Abstract:

    • Chao Huashan
  • "New Evidence of Manichaeism in Asia: A Description of Some Recently Discovered Manichaean Temples in Turfan", Monumenta Serica, 44 (1996): 267-315
    Abstract: Between 1902 and 1907, Berlin fur Volkerkunde sent three successive archaeological expeditions to Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang), where they investigated the ruins and ancient grottoes of Turfan. Around Turfan, they discovered numberous ancient manuscripts and other relics. In 1909, the Science Academy of Russia also sent an archaeological expedtion to Xinjiang that was mainly dedicated to the investigation of the Turfan grottoes. Between 1905 and 1913, the German expedition published expedition reports and pictures proposing that among the ruins of the ancient cities of Harahoja and Gaochang there was a Manichaean temple as well as another temple which originally may have been Manichaean. In 1914, the Russian expedition published a report that mentioned that a Manichaean grotto possibly also existed in Bazaklik. In 1931, an archaeologist from the Academie Francaise also investigated this cave and, apart from confirming that it was a Manichaean religious grotto, proposed that another cave was also a Manichaean grotto.

    In 1988, Takao Moriyasu from Japan's Osaka University investigated the Bazaklik grotto with the assistance of the Xinjiang authorities. In 1991, he published a monograph which pointed to another Manichaean grotto with inscriptions in the Uighur language.

    The Manichaean religion was found in Iran by Mani in the third century A.D., later spreading West to Western Asia, the Mediterranean coast and Europe. It also continued to extend Eastward into Eastern Asia, Xinjiang, China's Central Plains, the Northern deserts, and the Southeast Chinese coast. In the East and the West, the Manichaean religion was an ascendant world religion that survivied into the fifteenth century. Modern research of the Manichaean religion began in the nineteenth century, taken up by Western scholars relying chiefly on Christian texts. The twentieth-century's first major discoveries related to Manichaeism were the ancient manuscripts and groud-level temple ruins that the German expedition excavated in Turfan during the early 1900s. This century's second najor discovery was of early Manichaean manuscripts dating from the third to the sixth century that were found in North Africa during the 1930's. However due to the dilapidated and fragmentary quality of the texts and the paucity of monastery ruins, our knowledge of Manichaeism and its temples has remained meagre.

    In recent years, the author has led teams of research students to investigate the grottoes of Turfan. In three complexes of grottoes, these teams have succeed in identifying dozens of Manichaean grottoes. Some of these grottoes remain structurally complete, while others have retained many of their frescoes. These grottoes are extremely important for enhancing our understanding of the ancient Manichaean religion.

    • Chen Kwang-tzuu and Hiebert Fredrik T.
  • "The Late Prehistory of Xinjiang in Relation to Its Neighbors", Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1995
    Abstract: Recent research by Chinese archaeologists has identified many late prehistoric (2000-400 B.C.) oases, pastoral settlements, and cemeteries in eastern Central Asia (Xinjiang province of China). The synthesis presented here organizes the data into 10 archaeological cultures, defined on the basis of ceramics, burials, small finds, and architecutre. The archaeological cultures reveal two periods, corresponding to the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The oases cultures formed a core area before the Chinese Han period and maintained close contacts with nearby highland pastoralists in Siberia and western Central Asia. The evidence for interaction beween Xinjiang and the complex cultures in China and western Central Asia is evaluated with regard to the origin of the early Xinjiang cultures.

    • Fitzgerald-Huber, Louisa G.
  • "China's First Visitors From the West: Were They Indo-Europeans?" International Review of Chinese Linguistics, Volume 1 Number 1 1996
    Abstract: A Comment on E G Pulleyblank's article.
    • Francfort, H.-P.
  • "The Central Asian dimension of the symbolic system in Bactria and Margiana", Antiquity, Antiquity 68 (1994):406-18
    Abstract: The Bronze Age civilization of Bactria and Margiana emgerged after 2500 BC from the local cultures represneted at the sites of Sarazm, Mundigak, and Shar-i Sokhta, incorporating elements from Turkmenia (especiallyl in Margiana). from the Indus (pottery technques and some iconographic traits) and from Iran through the Proto-Elamite past and by an Elamite influx (techniques, parts of iconography and mythology), but also incorporating old Central Asia features connected with Inner Asia.

    This civilization fourished in Central, in the Oxus basin 2300-1800 BC (Francfort 1984; Francfort et all. 1989; Hiebert 1993), in the deltas of the Murghab and Balkhab Rivers. It expanded to Uzbekistan, to eastern Iran and into Baluchistan (Santoni 1984; 1988; Jarrige & Hassan 1989; During-Caspers 1992; Hiebert & Lamberg-Karlovsky 1992), and Seistan (Besenval & Francfort in press), merging with the piedmont Namazga V at the Kelleli and ancient Gonur oasis of Margiana. At a later phase (Namazga VI or Mollali) 1800-1500 BC, it penetrated into Tadjikistan (works of P'yankova and Vinogradova) and northeast Afghanistan and reoccupied partially the abandoned cities of Turkmenia (Francfort 1981). Contemporary with the (late) Namazga V of Turkmenia, with the Indus Harappan and the Iranian Elamite civilizations, it is chronologically close to the supposed 'coming of the Aryans' from Central Aisa or Syria to India.

    Usually, the iconographic mythological elements known from the Oxus Civilization are analysed and interpreted by a framework of Indo-Iranian (Sarianidi works in references), Aryan (Parpola 1993), Iranian (Pottier 1981; 1984; Azarpay 1992) or Elamite terminology (Amiet 1986).

    But the present approach is structuralist and therefore refrains from bestowing Zoroastrian or Elamite names on deities or devils. Structuralism is out of fashion but certainly not outdated in a case like the Oxus Civilization iconography. Here the representations are taken as a whole set, in spite of their chronological dispersion, or the uncertainty of their origins from unstratified or approximately dated contexts. The relations between the iconographic elements are the primary focus, since no textual or oral tradition exists to deinfe the nature of the various elements. synchrony and sets of relations between discrete elements are basic to the structuralist approach in art history, as exemplified by the studies of Palaeolithic art by Laming-Emperaire and Leroi-Gourhan (for a fair account in English of the structural analysis in ancient art see Conkey 1989).

    This approach permits a tentative reconstruction of a distinctive system of images. The Oxus Civilization scheme, representing the cycles of nature and life, is notably different from the usual and well-known interpretive schemes of the Mesopotamian, Indus or Avestan mythologies, but certainly related to the Iranian Elamite artistic language (forms and style) if not beliefs, and deeply rooted in Bactria-Margiana. In this respect, the symbolic system of the Oxus Civilization is an original expresssion of a more general Eurasian mythological universe of very ancient origin, which can be termed shamanistic.

    •  Henning W. B.
  • "The Name of the Tokharian Language", Asia Major, I/N.S., 1949
    Abstract: Two words have been regarded as names of the old language of Qarasahr ("I A"), which is almost universally called "Tokharian" now. One, arsi, found in documents written in that language, has been claimed as the indigenous name, used by the speakers of I A themselves; several scholars, however, foremost among them Professor H. W. Bailey, deny that arsi refers to I A at all and insist that it is a foreign word, a Prakrit of Skt. arya-, so that "arsi language" should mean aryabhasa = Sanskrit. The other, twyry, known from Uigur Turkish colophons to Buddhist books, is responsible for the introduction of the name of "Tokharian"; the late Professor Sten Konow, supported by Professor Bailey and others, rejected the opinion that the language designated as twyry by the Uighurs was the language now named "Tokharian"; in his view, twyry meant an Iranian dialect, probably Khotanese Saka. It is proposed here to re-examine the colophons in which twyry is mentioned, without entering into the problem of arsi for the present.

    •  Mair, Victor H.
  • "Prehistoric Caucasoid Corpses of the Tarim Basin", Journal of Indo-European Studies, Fall/Winter 1995, Volume 23, Numbers 3 & 4, pp. 281-307
    Abstract:

    • Mair, Victor H.
  • "The Significance of Dunhuang and Turfan Studies", "Early Iranian Influences on Buddhism in Central Asia", "History of Chinese Turkistan in the Pre-Islamic Period", Sino-Platonic Papers, March 1990, Volume 16
    Abstract: There are well over a thousand scholars around the world who are working on some aspect of Dunhuang and Turfan studies. Do these two remote places in Chinese Central Asia merit such intense interest on the part of so many? In the first instance, this paper attemps to show that Dunhuang and Turfan studies, though focussing on texts and artifacts associated with these two particular sties, actually have broad ramifications for the history of East-West cutlural and commercial relations in gerneral. Another major factor is the unique quality of many materials discovered at Dunhuang and Turfan. Archaeological finds from these locations have enabled us, for the first time, to obtain an essentially first-hand look at China and some of its neighbors during the medieval period. That is to say, we can now learn, for example, about popular culture during Tang times without being forced to view it through a Confucian historiographical filter. In other words, the availability of primary materials for correcting the biases of traditional historians and materials which document the existence of phenomena (languages, religions, popular literary genres, social customs, etc.) that were completely overlooked -- or even suppressed -- by them. As examples of the vivid immediacy afforded by such materials, two texts from Dunhuang manuscripts S4400 -- a prayer by Cao Yanlu -- and S3877 -- a contract for the sale of a woman's son -- are edited and translated. The paper concludes by stressing that, because of the complexity and vast scope of Dunhuang and Turfan studies, international cooperation is essential.

    •  Pulleyblank, Edward G.
  • "Early Contacts Between Indo-Europeans and Contact, International Review of Chinese Linguistics, Volume 1 number 1 1998
    Abstract: For four or five thousand years prior to 2000 BCE, a variety of neolithic cultures developed in the territory of what used to be called China proper (excluding, that is, Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet). They interacted with one another, but mainly peacefully as far as we can tell. Then, around 2000 BCE, just about the traditional date of the founding of the first dynasty, the Xia, the bronze age begins in the Central Plain, culminating around 1200 in the fully identifiable remains, of the last capital or cult centre of its successor, Shang, at Anyang. By this time (and presumable several centuries earlier if we give any credence at all to later tradition) it is clear that imperialistic conquest has replaced peaceful interaction. Moreover, there are unmistakable signs of western importations -- wheat and barley as cereal crops and most notably the horse-drawn chariot. How and when did these and other possible or probable western contributions reach China? Were they mere add-ons to an already self-generated and fully functioning nascent state system or were they essential ingredients of that system? The evidence is still not sufficient to give a definite answer, but it seems very likely that a stimulus from the west played a significant role in inaugurating the Chinese bronze age. In the long run, however, the content of the civilization that grew out of it owed much more ot earlier indigenous cultural traditions.

    •  Ringe, Donald
  • "Tocharians in Xinjiang: The Linguistic Evidence", Journal of Indo-European Studies, Fall/Winter 1995, Volume 23, Numbers 3 & 4, pp. 439-443
    Abstract:

    • Sick, David H.
  • "Cattle-Theft and the Birth of Mithras: Another Look at Cumont's Vedic Parallel" Journal of Indo-European Studies, Fall/Winter 1996, Volume 24, Numbers 3 & 4, pp. 257-275
    Abstract:

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