This paper examines the naming episode in the Quran's Adam story, in which God teaches Adam “the names, all of them”, to counter the angels' objection to the creation of the human creature on the basis that he will “spread corruption … and will shed blood”. I try to show that the traditional understanding of this narrative in Western scholarship, which connects it ultimately to the Genesis 2 episode in which Adam names all the creatures of the land and sky, fails to do justice to a close reading of the quranic text itself. Instead, I argue for an alternative reading of the passage already suggested by early Muslim exegetes, in which God's teaching Adam the “names” refers to Adam being introduced to his future offspring. This, in turn, is central to the Quran's engagement with the problem of theodicy.

This paper focuses on a group of Old Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang that are currently in the Stein and Pelliot Collections, some of which will be reordered and reunited. These texts were previously believed to concern the offering to the seven Tathāgatas or the texts about the former aspirations of the seven Buddhas. However, as my study shows, they actually pertain to liturgies for the seven Tathāgatas including Bhaiṣajyaguru. Based on earlier studies, this research seeks to establish a stronger connection between “pre-canonical” texts and canonical works in Tibetan and Chinese, and to establish a hitherto unknown link in the chain of the textual transmission of this liturgy. After revealing the structure of the liturgy, it seeks to fill the gap between the Bhaiṣajyaguru-sūtra itself and the religious practices of worshipping the seven Tathāgatas including Bhaiṣajyaguru. These are done through a two-dimensional textual analysis, i.e.: 1) identifying the connection between the Old Tibetan materials and the Tibetan canonical version; and 2) analysing the process of the liturgicalization of the sūtra.

The Anda manuscript and Haihun slips have revealed that there were several different stanza permutations for poems in the “Guo feng” 國風 in early China. As most repetitive stanzas are essentially nonlinear, there is no intrinsic sequence for many poems. Rather than finding a “superior” stanza order, I would like to consider how the various stanza orders might challenge traditional interpretations of references to stanza numbers in the Zuozhuan 左傳 and the hermeneutical rule of “orderly progression” in the Shijing. Just as establishing the order of stanzas took a long time, the development of this rule was gradual. The belief in there being an unalterable stanza order not only influences how rhymes are interpreted but also shapes how lines and verses are annotated. Therefore, reconsidering the theory of orderly progression is a step towards re-evaluating the tradition of Shijing interpretation.

Maura Dykstra's 2022 monograph Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State (Harvard Asia Center, 2022) has attracted controversy in the academic community. This paper analyses the book's use of documents from the Ba County Archive, held in the SIchuan Provincial Archive. While reviewing the monograph's arguments drawn from these materials, the paper also introduces the Ba Archives and the methodologies that may be employed to interpret them.

In this article, I touch on some lexical and morphological aspects of Prasun historical linguistics. I propose six new etymologies for Prasun words that have not been etymologized at all (üžóg “resin”, ćəwā́ “rhubarb”, wulóg “footprint”, žíma “tent, camp”) or differently (wuzógrog, zógrog “knee”, wuẓnúg, wuẓéŋ “salt”), and add further remarks to three words (üzǖ́ etc. “ice; cold”, lümī́, lümǖ́ “tail”, wəs “day”) with whose traditional etymologizations I basically agree. Furthermore, it is argued that the common epenthetic wu- ~ ü- and the final (usually) -u ~ -ü have the same origin and largely go back to the acc.sg.m/n, nom.sg.n *-am of the Indo-Iranian a-stems. Additionally, while the *-ka-suffix is present in all Nuristani languages in various functions, there is a noticeable split between Prasun, where *-ka- is added to many nouns of the inherited basic vocabulary while it is absent in the cognates in the other Nuristani languages.

This article addresses derivational issues related to palatalization in Khotanese, focusing on action nouns of the kīra- type (< *-i̯a-). It is argued that diachronic palatalization conforms to the rules of synchronic palatalization and that the origin of the hapax legomenon jsīna- “killing” (Z 13.124), which apparently violates these rules, needs to be interpreted differently. It is traced back to a reduplicated Indo-Iranian verbal stem *ǰa-ghn- (cf. Young Avestan jaɣn-) < Proto-Indo-European *gwhé-gwhn- “to strike repeatedly” → “to kill”. This stem is also reflected in the Khotanese gerundive jsīñaa- “to be killed” < *dzai̯n-i̯a- ← *dzaɣn- < Iranian *ǰa-gn-. The article contributes additional evidence supporting the development of the preconsonantal voiced velar fricative *ɣ into *i̯ in pre-Khotanese.

In 1983 and 1984, archaeologists excavated at the ruins of Khara-khoto, Inner Mongolia, about 3,000 fragments of handwritten and printed texts from the Yuan period (1271–1368). The texts were chiefly written in Chinese and Tangut but also included a handful of other languages. Among a small group of texts in Mongolian were fragments of a woodblock-printed book with illustrations, using the Uyghur script. The content of the text, as well as the presence of a few interlinear Chinese characters, made it clear that this was a translation of a Chinese work, probably of Daoist content. Because the folios were incomplete, the narrative framework of the text could only be reconstructed partially, which is also why the source text has not been identified so far. This article locates Chinese versions of the story and identifies one of them as the closest to that used by the translator. This, in turn, helps to improve our interpretation of the Mongolian fragments and provide background information for understanding the context of the text's circulation in the Khara-khoto region. My primary aim here is to engage with the original Chinese story, rather than the translation and its place in Mongolian literature.

During the Second World War, a number of manuscript fragments in Iranian languages from the Berlin Turfan collections were lost. Photographs of these fragments preserved in the Nachlass of Walter B. Henning bring to light their contents and fill gaps in the record of Turfan texts. These photographs are published here for the first time, together with a description of the fragments and their contents.

This article explores the unmined textual history of one of Tibet's most influential historiographies, the Pillar Testament (bKa’-chems-ka-khol-ma), usually dated to the eleventh or the twelfth century. Drawing on previously known and unknown witnesses, the article compares a variety of narratives across most extant redactions. In doing so, it finds that the redaction chiefly consulted by scholars to date is an expanded and contaminated version that is notably later than previously assumed. Instead, another and heretofore largely neglected witness emerges as the most archaic extant redaction. The textual comparisons spotlight a wide range of alterations in the work's narratives and thus demonstrate how perceptions of early Tibetan historical episodes shifted over time. Such changes affected remembrance of Sino-Tibetan imperial relations, the origins of Buddhism and writing in Tibet and the genealogy of its emperors, among other things. The article concludes by critically discussing the witnesses’ dating and the hope we may place in the hunt for the work's illustrious but elusive original.