Tokharien

HisTochText

History of the Tocharian Texts of the Pelliot Collection

Part of the ERC Advanced Grant that takes place from October 1, 2018 to March 31, 2024.

Georges-Jean Pinault

He is a director of studies emeritus at the Historical and Philological Sciences Section of the EPHE-PSL on the "Philology of Buddhist Texts of Central Asia" chair.

 

Project summary

In addition to the online publication of catalogues of the Sanskrit and Tocharian collections on the website archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr and the publication of online texts, accompanied by digitized photographs, this ambitious program aims to carry out a multidisciplinary study of these manuscripts using all available methods. Its originality lies in its association of the textual analysis itself, carried out with the resources of philology, with the material analysis of the support of the manuscripts, which are for the most part on paper and a minority on wood. The aim is to reconstruct the history of Buddhist written culture between 400 and 1000 CE and to provide reliable databases for the study of paleography, the composition of Buddhist "books", the practices of copyists' workshops, and the history of paper in Central Asia.

 

See also