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Central Asia Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum.

Supplementary Series, Vol. III: Iranian
Manichaean Turfan texts in early publications
(1904–1934). Photo edition. Edited by Werner
Sundermann. 51 pp., 192 plates. London: School
of Oriental and African Studies, on behalf of
Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, 1996. £60.

D. Durkin-Meisterernst

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 63 / Issue 01 / January 2000,
pp 136 - 137
DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X00006856, Published online: 05 February 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X00006856

How to cite this article:

D. Durkin-Meisterernst (2000). Review of Werner Sundermann 'Corpus
Inscriptionum Iranicarum. Supplementary Series, Vol. III: Iranian Manichaean
Turfan texts in early publications (1904–1934). Photo edition' Bulletin of the School
of Oriental and African Studies, 63, pp 136-137 doi:10.1017/S0041977X00006856

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136 REVIEWS
superiority over the non-natives. Each republic
established particular standard variants of local
history. Under these circumstances, there was
no academic freedom or public scientific debate
on the relations between Georgians and
Abkhazians. The normal rules of scientific
discussion were replaced by administrative
regulations stipulating the appropriate way to
approach these questions. It could be added to
Voronov and Lakoba's description that, to this
day, such traditions have had a strong impact
on debates concerning Georgian-Abkhazian
relations. Since the end of the 1980s, scholars
from both communities have avoided direct
contact, preferring to communicate their diver-
gences through the Abkhaz and Georgian
media. This has increasingly occurred in a
particularly vitriolic style, reminiscent of the
type of polemic of which Bolsheviks such as
Lenin were fond. This, of course, was not
helpful in increasing understanding of the
arguments put forward by scholars from the
other national community. This belligerent type
of scientific intercourse, built up over the years,
is one of the main factors that make normal
argumentative dialogue between Georgian and
Abkhazian scholars so difficult still.
Soviet traditions have also had a strong
impact on the content of scientific discourse on
the nationality question. "Voronov's remark that
local scientific structures had to legitimize the
leading role of the titular nation concerns not
only Union republics in their oppressive policies
towards minorities or autonomous republics
such as Abkhazia, but also scientific production
from the autonomous republics. This is appar-
ent in this book, where the history of the
Abkhazians is identified with the history of
Abkhazia. The non-Abkhaz nationalities
appear either as the product of Tsarist or
Soviet colonization—the Georgian population
of Abkhazia is described mostly from this
particular perspective—or are almost entirely
absent from the history of the country as is
the case with the Russians, Armenians and
Greeks in Abkhazia, despite the fact that
together they constitute about one-third of
Abkhazia's population. Russians and
Armenians are mentioned only as political
allies of the Abkhazians in passages describing
their support for the Abkhaz cause during the
1992-93 war. The Curzon series is devoted to
ethnic groups, and not to states or countries,
but this book claims to be as much about
Abkhazia as about the Abkhazians. According
to the editor's introduction, the publication of
this volume is intended to make relevant facts
about Abkhazia accessible to the English-
speaking world (p. 22). The identification
between ethnic group, homeland and state is
supported by the main thesis defended in the
contributions by Viacheslav Chirikba, Giorgij
Shamba, Stanislav Lakoba and the editor
himself. They all wish to demonstrate the
cultural continuity in the composition of the
population from the end of the third millennium
B.C. (Chirikba, p. 43) and the political continu-
ity of statehood for about 1,200 years. This
thesis—combined with the further thesis that
the presence of other nationalities in Abkhazia
and the minoritization of Abkhazians there (in
1989 they constituted only 18 per cent of the
population) should be seen as the result of
repressive or colonial policies under the Tsarist,
Georgian and Soviet regimes—makes it under-
standable that the non-Abkhaz nationalities
are either described in antagonistic terms or
are only included at the margins of the
historical narrative. This book is certainly an
excellent presentation to an English-speaking
public of the way in which Abkhazian scholars
view the past and future of their nation, and
the leading role of their own nationality in the
nation- and state-building policies of Abkhazia.
I doubt, however, that such a historical narrat-
ive will fit in with the type of national self-
image that would be required to underpin the
peaceful coexistence of Abkhazia's many con-
stituent nationalities.
BRUNO COPPIETERS
Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum.
Supplementary Series, Vol. Ill:
Iranian -Manichaean Turfan texts in
early publications (1904-1934).
Photo edition. Edited by Werner
Sundermann. 51 pp., 192 plates.
London: School of Oriental and
African Studies, on behalf of
Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum,
1996. £60.
This photo edition of Middle Iranian Turfan
fragments contains black and white reproduc-
tions of the fragments published from F. W. K.
Muller's first publication in 1904 up to 1934,
when the third of Henning's articles from
Andreas's papers appeared. Most of the texts
are in the Turfan Collection in Berlin (including
those kept for a while in Mainz), some in the
Museum fur indische Kunst, Berlin, also found
by the Turfan expeditions 1902-14; but a small
collection in St. Petersburg (in the Institut
Vostokovedenija), which came from the same
sites and show obvious similarities to the texts
in the Turfan Collection, is also included—
most of these were published by Salemann.
Sundermann notes on p. 11 that he learnt of
further fragments in St. Petersburg too late for
inclusion in this edition: these are in any case
unpublished texts. The texts on the fragments
published here are in Middle Persian, Parthian
and some in Sogdian, but the Sogdian texts
Muller worked on (Soghdische Texte i, 1912
and Muller-Lentz, Soghdische Texte n, 1934)
are not included. A few Uighur texts are also
included. Most of the texts are in Manichaean
script, though a few are in Sogdian script and
in Turkish runes.
The edition contains an introduction, a list
of the fragments reproduced here with publica-
tion details, a concordance of old numbers and
the corresponding new ones and a complete list
of the fragments in the 20 publications from
1904 to 1934 that form the basis for this
publication. Added to the list are the re-editions
in Boyce, Reader, 1975 and Hutter, Manis
kosmogonische Sdbuhragdn-Texlje, 1992 but not
the new edition of the Sdbuhragan by
MacKenzie, 1979-80, because this includes
more texts than those published by Muller and
in any case contains fairly adequate reproduc-
 REVIEWS
tions. The decision to reproduce the texts
already reproduced in the plates of Hutter's
1992 edition was dictated not only by the desire
to adhere to the chronology of the first
publication but also by the superior quality of
the reproductions in this edition. Of the large
number of texts quoted (often very briefly) in
Waldschmidt-Lentz, 1926 and 1933, only the
most important are reproduced here. Further,
the edition contains a list of plates, precise
measurements of the fragments (when available:
most of those of the St. Petersburg fragments
are unsure), references and abbreviations and
the 192 large plates with reproductions of
mostly one, sometimes two or three, and in the
case of small fragments a larger number of
fragments to the page. The quality of the black
and white reproductions is good. In some rare
cases when an original has been lost an old
photograph is reproduced, in one case as a
negative. The plates, however, do not reproduce
the fragments to the original size (a drawback
when considering possible joins or pages from
similar manuscripts) and the fragment-number
is not printed on the top of the page; only the
plate number is given, forcing the user to turn
back to the list of plates at the front of the
book to identify the fragment.
For the first time these fragments are made
available outside of the originals in Berlin and
St. Petersburg or the photographs in the
Andreas papers in the State and University
Library in Gottingen. Together with the numer-
ous black and white reproductions in the
various editions Sundermann has published
over the years, access is now provided to quite
a large proportion of the more or less well
preserved fragments, particularly in Parthian
and Middle Persian, a process that will hope-
fully be continued in the future and extended
to fragments in the other languages preserved
in the Turfan Collection. The next step, already
announced on p. 10, will be a similar photo
edition of texts published mainly between 1935
and 1973.
Whilst there can be no doubt that reproduc-
tions (especially if they are to be affordable)
cannot compete with the originals, they provide
essential information available by no other
means. Readings in published texts can be
checked with ease, indeed a mere glance at a
reproduction can make clear how well written
and how well preserved it is and so remove
doubts about the quality of the text. In other
cases it is essential to know what a fragment
looks like (colour and texture of paper, shape
of a tear) to see if a join with another fragment
is at all possible. This significant portion of
texts in reproduction should enable a neglected
area of Turfan studies, the palaeography of the
scripts used, to start to get off the ground,
though certain aspects such as the red and
other coloured inks used in captions and
headlines are not easily identifiable on black
and white reproductions. The relative homogen-
eity of the texts (in palaeography and ductus),
while indicative of the majority of the fragments
in the Turfan Collection, is in particular
relevant to Muller's approach to the fragments
(but also to the collectors themselves?); he
naturally concentrated on clearly readable texts
and consequently on liturgical texts.
The greatest philological gains in text mat-
137
erial can be expected in the reproductions of
those texts Miiller published in 1904
(fiandschriftenreste II) and which have not been
re-edited since. Muller's edition is practically
unusable without reproductions since he was
not very consistent in marking the end of lines,
omissions, etc. Saleman's republication of the
same texts in 1908 could not alter this defect
since the latter never saw the originals in Berlin
(and his gratitude to Mtiller on p. vi for
checking the readings was purely wishful think-
ing). Many of Muller's texts have been re-edited
in the meantime, in important publications in
their own right, and Boyce, Reader, includes
most of them but in a form that did not set
out to address all the problems of detail a full
edition would have entailed. Including these,
approximately a third of Muller's texts awaits
re-editing. This photo edition has already
drawn attention to one of the most interesting
of these texts, M28 I, a hymn containing
polemic against other religions. This had been
published only in part by Muller. P. O. Skjaerv0
in a review article on this book (BAI, N.S.9,
1997, 239 55) presented an edition and transla-
tion of the whole text. F. de Blois reacted in
turn with a new and convincing interpretation
of part of the text (JRAS, 1998, 481 5).
D. DURKIN-MEISTERERNST
PETER RICHARDUS (ed.): with an intro-
duction by Alex McKay: Tibetan
lives. Three Himalayan autobio-
graphies, xxvii, 223 pp. Richmond:
Curzon, 1998. £40.
Johan van Manen (1877-1943) was a Dutch
orientalist who moved on from involvement
with the theosophical movement in Europe to
active research into Tibetan religion and culture
in South Asia. He was in Darjeeling from
1916-18 and then in Calcutta where he worked
in the Imperial Library and the Indian Museum
before, in 1923, becoming General Secretary of
the Asiatic Society of Bengal. During these
years van Manen employed a number of
Tibetans, Sikkimese and persons of related
origins both as informants and as collectors
and copyists of Tibetan texts. Three such
people, Phunt-tsogs Lung-rtogs (from Central
Tibet, 1882-1926) k, sKar-ma Sum-dhon Paul
(of Eastern Tibetan origin, 1877-c. 1935), and
Ts 'an-chih Chen (of Sino-Tibetan stock, dates
not given), were evidently persuaded by van
Manen to compile autobiographies, the subject
of the work under review, to which are added
a number of rather naive but informative
sketches by Ts 'an-chih Chen relating to Tibetan
life, religion and history, including an impres-
sion of the British Indian troops of the
Younghusband expedition parading before the
Potala in Lhasa in August 1904.
These three autobiographies have been edited
(and condensed?) with great skill by Peter
Richardus from Leiden, though the general
reader might find the strict adherence to the
peculiarities of Tibetan orthography a trifle
irritating, for example lHasa for Lhasa, or
Ta-la'i bLama for Dalai Lama (if only to
reduce greatly the utility of the index). Their