A Comprehensive Edition of Tocharian Manuscripts

The project aimed at establishing an on-line accessible database of the two extinct languages Tocharian A and Tocharian B in order to provide text editions and a description of the Tocharian grammar and lexicon. The two extinct languages Tocharian A and Tocharian B represent an independent branch of the Indo-European language family and are only known to us due to original manuscript fragments from the 1st century CE found in todays Chinese western province Xinjiang as part of the Ancient Silk Road. Since these documents are scattered in various archives worldwide, the database for the first time enables central access to the whole material. For most documents we provide images, edition, translation and commentaries. The main part of the text corpus contains Buddhist literature and accordingly represents a basic source for studying the development and spread of Buddhism in Central Asia and China. Apart from literary texts we have business documents and letters which provide a valuable source for understanding social and economic life in the Silk Road cultures of the 1st millennium. In addition all texts have been linguistically annotated so that the database also contains a description of the Tocharian grammar and lexicon. Various combinable search functions enable for the first time the use of the whole Tocharian evidence for a variety of research areas such as Buddhist Studies or linguistics.