The Characters that shaped the Silk Road - A Database and Digital Paleography of Tarim Brahmi

From the 2nd century CE on, Buddhist communities and monasteries developed along the trade routes of the Silk Road in the Tarim Basin in todays Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the Peoples Republic of China. These were centers of writing, copying, translating, and transmitting texts and scriptures similar to the monasteries in medieval Europe. The old Indo-European languages Sanskrit, Tocharian, and Khotanese were the major languages of the monasteries in the Tarim Basin. The most important script these languages were written in was a special Central Asian variety of the Indian Brahmi writing system. The earliest material written in this Tarim Brahmi is among the oldest attested Buddhist texts. Most of the material written in Tarim Brahmi is scattered over different editions and not digitally searchable. It is the goal of the project to make all texts written in Tarim Brahmi available to paleographic investigation in an online database. The project centers on the question of who wrote what, when, where, and how. These classical issues of paleography so far can only be applied to a small portion of the material or have only been addressed rudimentarily. The project aims at answering these questions by means of a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The database will combine linguistic, philological, and paleographic data. It will directly link the texts with their digital images. This will make it possible to search for specific characters, ligatures, and words in the entire corpus. Additionally, the quantifiable features of all characters, ligatures, and words will be extracted and compared using computer programs. This will, for the first time, make it possible to identify scribes, scribal schools, as well as regional and diachronic variants of Tarim Brahmi. Almost all texts of the languages written in Tarim Brahmi are in a fragmentary state. Therefore, one of the most important results of the project will be that the countless smaller fragments will be able to be joined together based on paleographic criteria. The new texts, contexts, and word forms will lead to new linguistic and philological insights for Sanskrit, Tocharian, and Khotanese. Since the paleography will also shed light on the dating and localization of texts it will provide new perspectives on regional, social, and diachronic layers of the languages and texts. This will in turn elucidate the relationship between languages and texts, which again will have important consequences for the understanding of the transmission of Buddhism in Central Asia and, from there, to China. The project will be carried out by the linguist and Central Asian scholar Hannes A. Fellner and an international team of scholars in linguistics and Digital Humanities.

The project examined the Tarim-Brahmi script, which originated from India and was used along the Silk Road in the Tarim Basin, located in the present-day China, roughly between the second and tenth centuries CE. This script was employed to transmit the Indo-European languages Sanskrit, Saka, and Tocharian. It played a key role in the dissemination of Buddhist content and cultural practices, providing valuable insights into the linguistic and cultural development of this significant region. A central aim of the project was to make the rich linguistic diversity of this region accessible through digital technologies. Methods from Digital Humanities were applied to capture, analyze, and organize the linguistic evidence written in the Tarim-Brahmi script into a database. By employing modern digital paleographic techniques, individual manuscripts could be classified into various writing schools, documenting regional, historical, and stylistic variations. The database provides an overview of the development of the Tarim-Brahmi script and its varieties in relation to the evolution of the involved languages over several centuries. Particular attention was given to reconstructing the development and use of the script in different contexts: on the one hand, the Brahmi script served as a medium for religious texts in Sanskrit, but also in Tocharian and Saka. On the other hand, it was employed in secular contexts, making it an important link among the various cultures along this part of the Silk Road. With the digital paleography, the Tarim-Brahmi script and its variants can now be classified according to various linguistic, philological, and historical aspects, facilitating a better understanding of the linguistic ecology and cultural diversity along this segment of the Silk Road. The project illustrates how Digital Humanities contribute to the documentation, analysis, and preservation of historical language, text, and cultural diversity. The database and paleographic analysis not only facilitate the understanding of historical changes in the script but also enable the texts written in it to be made accessible in an interactive, publicly available format worldwide for research and interested audiences. This allows the comprehensive exploration of this script, the languages it represents, and the associated content, thereby enriching international research on these ancient Indo-European languages and cultures of the eastern Silk Road. By combining paleography, linguistics, and Digital Humanities, the project has created new pathways for exploring the history of the Silk Road. The research findings significantly contribute to a better understanding of the language landscape of the Tarim Basin and its role in cultural exchange in this part of Central Asia. The digital database serves as a valuable tool for foundational research to preserve and analyze the rich heritage of the Tarim region and its languages while enhancing the understanding of the complex cultural connections along the eastern Silk Road.