Christian Sogdian Book Culture

The project studies the emergence and development of a Christian Sogdian book culture resulting from cultural- religious activities carried out by Christian Iranian communities in the Turfan oasis (present-day Xinjiang, China), during late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It focuses on a corpus of nearly 500 fragments in Sogdian language in East Syriac script and circa fifty fragments in Sogdian secular script. As translations from Syriac form the basis for the Christian Sogdian corpus, the project will also take into account nearly 500 fragments in Syriac language in East Syriac script mostly coming from the same area and belonging to the same period. Most fragments are now housed in the Berlin Turfan Collection. The existence of Christian communities in late antique and early medieval Central Asia was the result of missionary activities of the "Church of the East" since the 5th century. Along the Silk road Syriac speaking Christian monks and missionaries from Mesopotamia encountered peoples of different cultures, languages, and religions; among them the Sogdians, speakers of an eastern Middle Iranian language, who were the main caravan merchants of Central Asia. The Sogdian and Syriac manuscripts that have come to light in the Turfan oasis form the single most important corpus of sources for the study of Sogdian Christian communities. The proposed project undertakes a new comprehensive study of this corpus. The methodology combines two main approaches: Codicology and translational studies. So far no systematic codicological study has been attempted for this material. The advantage of a codicological approach lies in the fact that it allows to bridge the gap between the texts (well-studied from a philological-linguistic point of view) and the still practically unexplored material aspects of manuscripts in order to look at the book as a cultural product in an extensive way. The second approach tries to expand the field of "translational studies" from a primarily linguistic- philological focus on religious literary translations by extending it to images and symbols. In other words, Christian Middle Iranian book culture will be analysed by bringing together the study of textual and material aspects and of the role of translation, interference and innovation of images and symbols in Sogdian andSyriac manuscripts from Turfan. The state of the philological-linguistic study of this corpus makes this project feasible and significant at this time. The first catalogue of the Iranian manuscripts in Syriac script in the Berlin Turfan collection was published last year and the first catalogue of the Syriac manuscripts is in print. It is therefore time to take further steps towards understanding the nature of Christian Middle Iranian book culture, which will also shed new light on its cultural- historical context, the Christian communities in 8th- to 11th-century Central Asia.