Old and Middle Iranian Languages

Scholars of East Syrian Christianity in Tang China (607-917) have given a great deal of attention to the issue of the names the Tang government gave to this most celebrated of all the Western religions.  The broader topic of the names ancient and medieval China gave to the polities to its west has also by no means been neglected.  For the study of Christianity in the Tang Empire, the significance of the issue is borne out by the head piece of the Church of the East’s Xi’an stele, set in place in 781, which begins with the words: Da-Qin Jing-jiao Zhong-guo bei 大秦景教中国碑, or “the Da-Qin Luminous Religion (in) China pillar.”  The name Da-Qin Jing-jiao (lit. “Da-Qin Teaching/Religion”) was promulgated by official decree for the Church of the East by the Tang court in the year 745.  The designation “Da-Qin (Luminous) Teaching,” replaced an earlier official designation of Bo-si jiao 波斯教 (lit. “Persia[n] Teaching/Religion) given to the East Syrians by the Tang court in 635. What and where was Da-Qin? Was the Church of the East in Tang China “Persian” even after it became identified with the name Da-Qin? And what light might an investigation of the Church of the East’s connection to science and technology, well documented in the church’s Mesopotamian and Iranian setting, and having received important recent attention by Sinologists working in the Tang context, come to shed on our understanding of the place name Da-Qin?

At the easternmost edge of the Iranic world, settled rather than saddled Scythians ran the kingdom of Khotan as Iranian-speaking Buddhists who traded and tussled with their T’ang and Tibetan neighbours. Straddling the Sino-Tibetan and Irano-Indic oecumenes, these Saka dynasts of the southern ‘Silk Road’ were conquered and converted by the Turkification and Islamisation of the Tarim Basin. Their effect, both historical and artistic, merits consideration in Scythian studies for their own achievements. This survey is based on the existing corpora of administrative and religious texts in Khotanese, an amply documented Middle Iranian language, which enables the tracing of the trajectory of these Scythian legatees until the end of antiquity.

The present paper aims at surveying numerals in Khotanese. It also explains the manner of construction of ordinal, distributive, approximative and composite numbers in this language. It likewise alludes to the most common linguistic phenomenon related to numerals, namely the repetition of numbers and its usages in Khotanese. This topic is also examined in ancient languages such as Sanskrit and Avestan.

In this paper, the etymology of the names of three musical instruments is revised from the cultural-linguistic point of view. One of the key factors that unite these musical terms is that, according to the most widely accepted opinion, all three names were considered to be borrowed from Syriac. Another important fact is that these instruments were of great importance in the epic-mythological and religious-ritual life.
The closest Semitic parallels of these three terms have an end vowel -ā, which corresponds to the Armenian ending -ay (-այ). This ending in the words cncłay and šep‘or appears as an intelligible or unintelligible suffix, meanwhile in the word k‘nar it is revealed only in the case of declension. Consequently, in the above-mentioned terms there is no general morphological trait that should be present in the case of borrowing from a common source (given the same borrowing period).
An independent analysis of each of these terms also brings to different results. If the exam of the word k‘nar shows that there is insufficient phonological evidence in order to consider this word as a loan, and in reality it is a typical sample among the common cultural terms of our region, then in the case of the word šep‘or, one can clearly speak of a loanword according to the phonetic, semantic, and philological features. However, the case of the word cncłay is quite different, because its detailed etymological study, taking into consideration the rich dialectological material of the Armenian language, clearly points to its independent onomatopoeic origin.

A close examination of the Bactrian inscription of Rabatak is undertaken to reveal the inscriptional and literary traditions from which it is sourced, the history of its composition and the individual layers of text which underlie its final form. Comparisons with other inscriptions from ancient Iranian history indicate a limited understanding of the Kušān authors of Iranian literary tradition and formula. A comparison especially with other Kušān Bactrian inscriptions as well as semantic and etymological analysis demonstrates that the Rabatak inscription cites a proclamation by Kaniška I which can be reconstructed to a certain extent, but also that other sources for and layers of the composition of the inscription exist. This becomes apparent most prominently in a comparison with the silver bowl inscription of Nukunzuk, which cites the same proclamation. It is argued that the proclamation was made by Kaniška in Greek language, but also that it possesses parallels in ancient Iranian inscriptions which may indicate Iranian traditions present in the text. Other cases of literary sources and traditions are less specific but still possess some weight especially in the use of certain words, phrases and grammatical structures. This analysis will help place the Rabatak Inscription, and by extension the early Kušān Empire, in the broader context of ancient Iranian history.

Paru dans Des contrées avestiques à Mahabad, via Bisotun. Études offertes en hommage à
Pierre Lecoq, CPOR 2, Céline Redard (éd.), Neuchâtel, 2016, pp. 25-60.



In the great inscription of Bisotun, King Darius, speaking in the first person, relates how he managed to cross the Tigris with his army before defeating the army of the Babylonian Nidintu-Bel, one of the 'rebel kings'. The short account of this undertaking, however, with its several lexical and syntactic ambiguities, leaves open many questions about how things had actually gone. The author of this paper analyses in detail the three, somehow divergent parallel passages (i.e., Old Persian, Achaemenid Elamite and Achaemenid Babylonian) of this multilingual text and the relationships among them, focusing on the translation strategies and techniques followed by the authors of the royal inscriptions. Since different possible scenarios may be reconstructed from the three versions, the author concludes that the narrative of the Tigris crossing has to be interpreted taking into account the ideological concerns and rhetoric conventions characterizing the Bisotun narrative of the royal deeds, not so different from the epic-heroic conventions characterizing many ancient Near Eastern royal inscriptions. Résumé Dans la grande inscription de Bisotun, le roi Darius, parlant à la première personne, raconte comment il a réussi à traverser le Tigre avec son armée avant de vaincre l'armée du babylonien Nidintu-Bel, un des « rois rebelles ». Le bref récit de cette entreprise, cependant, avec plusieurs ambiguïtés lexicales et syntaxiques, laisse ouvertes de nombreuses questions sur la façon dont les choses se sont réellement produites. L'auteur de cet article analyse en détail les trois passages (c'est-à-dire, vieux-perse, élamite achéménide et babylonien achéménide) parallèles, en quelque sorte divergents de ce texte multilingue et les relations entre eux, en mettant l'accent sur les stratégies de traduction et les techniques suivies par les auteurs des inscriptions royales. Puisque différents scénarios possibles peuvent être reconstruits à partir de ces trois versions, l'auteur conclut que le récit de la traversée du Tigre doit être interprété en tenant compte des préoccupations idéologiques et des conventions rhétoriques, qui caractérisent le récit des actes royaux de Bisotun, pas si différentes des conventions épiques-héroïques qui caractérisent de nombreuses inscriptions royales du Proche Orient ancien.

Paragraph 14 of Darius inscription at Bisotun is devoted to the measures taken by Darius in order to restore the legitimate kingship usurped by Gaumāta and to re-establish the social order thrown into confusion by the revolt leaded by the magus. The central core of the paragraph is (A) Darius' re-establishment of the kingship; (B) the realisation of some royal action (specified in all three languages by the general verb 'to make, to do') regarding the ā ̆ yadanā/ AN zí-ia-an AN na-ap-pan-na/É.˹MEŠ˺ šá DINGIR.MEŠ destroyed by Gaumāta. Analysing the syntactic structure of the three versions, studying the structure of the word ā ̆ yadanā – considered as problematic already by the early editors of the Bisotun inscription – the author discusses LECOQ's (1995) interpretation, stating some details which allow a better interpretation of § 14 as a whole.
Résumé: Le §14 de l'inscription de Darius à Bisotun est consacré aux mesures prises par Darius pour restaurer la royauté usurpée par Gaumāta et pour rétablir l'ordre social qui avait été mis à mal par la révolte du mage. L'objet central du paragraphe est (A) le rétablissement par Darius de la royauté soustraite, comme elle l'était auparavant ; (B) la réalisation d'une action royale (indiquée dans les trois langues par le verbe général 'faire') concernant les ā ̆ yadanā/ AN zí-ia-an AN na-ap-pan-na/É.˹MEŠ˺ šá DINGIR.MEŠ que Gaumāta avait détruits. En analysant la syntaxe des trois versions, en étudiant la structure du mot ā ̆ yadanā qui a été considéré problématique déjà à l'époque de la première publication des textes de Bisotun, l'auteur discute l'interprétation du passage donnée par LECOQ (1995), en précisant des détails qui permettent une meilleure interprétation du § 14 dans son ensemble.

Heretofore three fragments of Maniʼs Living Gospel – the most important work of Mani – have been recognized in Middle Persian and in Manichaean script: M17, M172/I/ and M644. This article, with a codicological and textological approach, shows that M17 and the new fragment M5439 are two separate pieces of a single manuscript page. The verso-side of M5439 has a new text. Now, after the identification and reading of this damaged fragment, we are able to correct the previous reconstructions and comment on a few Middle Persian words. The text contains a part of the exordium and of the chapter ˈalephˈ of the Living Gospel.

The paper deals with the lexical set of cognate words to which Kurdish bažn, Persian bašn (generally recorded as 'stature') belong. These words are attested in Middle and Modern Western Iranian and are dialectologically connoted, being nowadays mostly found in Central dialects, Kurdish, Go-rani and Zazaki areas. By reviewing lexicographical and textual sources, the author picks out the semantic peculiarities of the bašn-forms. Starting from the notion of HEIGHT and through meta-phorical associations and shift of reference, bašn-forms have acquired different senses mostly involving the body domain ('body', 'waist' etc.) but with extensions to other domains. They have also undergone grammaticalization processes. As far as Western Middle Iranian is concerned, all the occurrences of Pahlavi bašn, Manichaean Parthian bašnān and Middle Persian bašnāy have been listed and discussed.