Instrumenta Tocharica

The anthology Instrumenta Tocharica contains ten papers on Tocharian manuscripts written by scholars from Germany, the Netherlands, France, the United States, and from Austria. They discuss the different collections of Tocharian manuscripts inside and outside Europe, the history of their acquirement, the currenct state of the collectings (including concordances), and the recent state of research. Since this kind of information on the various collections was until now basically confined to very few specialists, the publication will greatly facilitate work with Tocharian manuscripts for a wider variety of scholars like indologists, Buddhist scholars, Central Asian scholars, and historical linguists. This also true for the papers providing first-ever detailed studies on the Tocharian script type, i.e., of the Tocharian variant of the Central Asian Brahmi. On the study of the script an inner-Tocharian text chronology is based which is of immense importance for historical linguistics.