De Blois, Francois

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studieshttp://journals.cambridge.org/BSOAdditional services for Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereCorpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum. Part m: Pahlavi Inscriptions. Vol. IV. Ostraca and Vol. v. Papyri. Texts i: Ostraca, Papyri und Pergamente: Textband. Von Dieter Weber, x, 265 pp., 42 plates, 2 maps. London: School of Oriental and African Studies for the CII, 1992. £30.Francois De BloisBulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 56 / Issue 02 / June 1993, pp 377 ­ 378DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X00005784, Published online: 05 February 2009Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X00005784How to cite this article:Francois De Blois (1993). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 56, pp 377­378 doi:10.1017/S0041977X00005784Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/BSO, IP address: 212.219.238.14 on 29 Oct 2012REVIEWS 377to Europe ' durch manichaische Vermittlung'has indeed been postulated, but never demon-strated. In the much appreciated bibliographyof Mackenzie's publications read (p. x, subanno 1978) Kamus, not KamQs.FRANCOIS DE BLO1SCorpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum.Part m: Pahlavi Inscriptions.Vol. IV. Ostraca and Vol. v. Papyri.Texts i: Ostraca, Papyri undPergamente: Textband. Von DieterWeber, x, 265 pp., 42 plates,2 maps. London: School ofOriental and African Studies forthe CII, 1992. £30.The most recent volume of the CorpusInscriptionum Iranicarum is Dieter Weber'simpressive edition of Middle Persian ostraca,papyri and parchments. After a short intro-duction we find the editor's readings of the199 ostraca and 59 papyri (or parchments)which had been published in photographicfacsimile (but without interpretation) in anearlier portfolio of the CII (Ostraca andPapyri, ed. J. de Menasce, 1957) followed bythose of 65 previously unpublished papyri.For each text Weber gives first a physicaldescription, then a transliteration and (wherepossible) transcription and translation andfinally an extensive commentary. The texts arefollowed by several appendices: first, adetailed discussion of the palaeography of thedocuments with a useful table of typical letter-forms. Second, a (necessarily brief) discussionof the linguistic and stylistic characteristics ofthese meagre documents. Then, after a list ofthe date-formulae and the identifiable personalnames and a discussion of the place-names, acomplete word-index; the latter would perhapshave been even more useful if the individualwords had been glossed. The volume con-cludes with beautifully clear photographs ofthe hitherto unpublished items.Weber's book is a pioneering and funda-mental contribution to Iranian studies. Apartfrom Olaf Hansen, who, now more than 50years ago, published a much smaller collectionof papyri from Berlin, he is the first scholar toattempt in print a reading of any significantnumber of what remain probably the most dif-ficult documents in Middle Pesian. It is per-fectly clear that anyone who might in futureventure to struggle with these miserable scrapsof pottery and papyrus will take Weber'smeticulous work as his point of departure.The papyri, which form the larger part ofthis collection, are, like all the known MiddlePersian papyri, from Egypt, whereby Weber,like his predecessors, accepts that they mustbelong to the brief period of Sasanian rule inEgypt during the last decade of the reign ofXusr6y II Abarwez, i.e. roughly between 619and 628. The fact that a number of the papyrimention a gundsalar certainly seems to imply aPersian military presence in the Nile valley,though one should perhaps not entirely ruleout the possibility that some of the texts mighthave been written after the Byzantine recon-quest, for this need not necessarily have led tothe expulsion of all the Persians who were liv-ing in the country. What has not as yet beennoted is that one of the documents containswhat seems to be a precise date; 1 am referringto the parchment P 19, a fragment of a letterwritten, as Weber puts it, 'mit extrem kur-sivem Duktus' and ' daher nur bedinge inter-pretierbar'. In lines 6-7 the editor reads:(. . .) YWM 'hl(y)swng' Y' MNBYRH tylQ D M . . XXXX'IIII III (. . .)That line 6 mentions a day and a month is, Ishould think, clear, although Weber's readingof the letters between YWM and BYRH isneither grammatically plausible nor easily rec-oncilable with what is visible on the photo-graph. For the unread signs after QDM thecontext would seem to require SNT, * year', apossible, if by no means obvious, interpreta-tion of the minute letters. For the MP idiomabar sal X. (as opposed to the common earlyNP sal bar X.) compare Dura Europus I, theinscription at IqUd, the inscription at Barm iDilak (as read by Gignoux, Studio Iranica, 20,1991, 12) and, 1 should think, also the last lineof P 44 of this collection (read: BYRH 'tr1Q[DM SNT.. . ] ) . The following number,though it could conceivably be ' 47', is morelikely to be ' 37' (the first loop of the initialligature is significantly larger than the second)and it is only this interpretation which gives usa date during the Persian occupation of Egypt.I would thus read.(. . .) YWM 'ltwh(5)t W BYRH tylQDM SNT XXX IIII HI (. . .)i.e. roz ArdwahiSt ud mah TTr abar sal 37,which would correspond (if we assume, withNoldeke, that the first regnal year of XusroyII began on 27 June 590) to 18 September 626.The largest group of ostraca (O I to O 190)was discovered by Herzfeld near Rayy inNorthern Iran and was attributed by him tothe sixth century. Their stereotyped formula-tion permits a fairly clear interpretation. Theybegin (often, though not always) with a for-mula of blessing, such as abzon, and a date(normally only a day-name, sometimes a dayand a month), mention a personal name (usu-ally preceded by the preposition o or pad) anda specified quantity of some commodity (mostcommonly wine) and end with a verb, usuallyYHBWN, less commonly YHBWNt(') orYHB. Since in these texts the letter t is oftenreduced to a mere vertical stroke it is (asWeber remarks, p. 214, n. 4) often not possibleto say whether what we have is in factYHBWNt and not simply YHBWN1, with anotiose final stroke. In all cases Weber readsthe verb as dad and consequently interpretsthese ostraca as treasury records: they immor-talize the fact that such-and-such a quantity ofwine (or whatever) ' was given ' to so-and-so.However, at least in ' Book Pahlavi' (whichmust be the primary term of reference forthese texts in cursive script) an ideogram with-out ' phonetic complement' does not representa past participle. One would thus rather expectYHBWN to stand for the imperative dah. Inthis case the texts would be instructions from378 REVIEWSan official to a warehouse-worker to the effectthat the latter should hand out the commod-ity in question to such-and-such a person.Although the less common YHBWNtf)—-in sofar as this reading is actually certain—couldindeed represent dad, the otherwise consistentform of the documents would seem rather torequire that we read the imperative dahed,' give! (plural)'. (In these texts the vowels ofthe verb endings are not generally indicated inwriting; see Weber, p. 215.) The interpretationof the ostraca as lunch-tickets rather than asrecords of treasury transactions is supportedby the fact that they have very often beencrossed out (Weber: ' entwertet'), evidently toprevent fraudulent re-use of the discardedtokens. It would seem pointless to cross out atreasury record: these would either be storedfor further reference, or, if no longer needed,thrown away. Moreover, the assumption thatthe texts are at least notionally letters fromone person to another explains also why theyso often begin with a formula of blessing orgreeting, again pointless in a mere record. Inparticular, the interpretation of the concludingverb-forms as imperatives allows us to makesense of the frequent opening formula 'StPWN LK' (with variants), which evidentlymeans ' Peace be to you!', an interpretationwhich Weber considered (p. 12), but thenabandoned in favour of the suggestion thatLK' is an abbreviation for 'LYK (whichWeber misquotes as 'RYK), dagr ' long', andthat the formula consequently means * Friedenfar lange (Zeit)'. The difficulty does, however,remain that in ' Book Pahlavi' theAramaeogram LK (to) is written without afinal otiose strike.In his discussion of the script Weber makesa distinction between the letter l (with a loop,as in ' Book Pahlavi') and / (either with ahorizontal line in place of the loop, or merelyas a vertical stroke) and claims that the latteris ' ein selbsta'ndiges Zeichen und nicht aus /herleitbar', referring for further discussion toan article of his which has not yet been pub-lished but which I have had the privilege tohear read at a conference. A full discussion ofthis hypothesis must await its appearance inprint; for the moment it may suffice to saythat Weber's claim (following Hansen) thatthe ideogram traditionally read as PWN oughtinstead to be interpreted as pf leaves out ofconsideration the fact that in MP monumentalscript the word is unambiguously written asPWN.FRANCOIS DE BLOISWILHELM EILERS: WestiranischeMundarten: die Mundart vonSivand. (Westiranische Mundartenaus der Sammlung Wilhelm Eilers,Bd. in.) [xxiv], 376 pp., 4 plates.Stuttgart: Franz Steiner VerlagGmbH, 1988. DM 184.The book under review is the third volumein a presentation of the Western Iraniandialects of present-day Iran and deals withthat of Sivand, which is located about twelvemiles north-east of Persepolis on the old routeconnecting Isfahan and Shiraz. The author,having held the chair for Iranistik at theUniversity of Wurzburg for many years, diedon 3 July 1989 and whether a fourth volumeof his Westiranische Mundarten on the dialectsof Anarak and of the oasis of yiir as envis-aged in this book (cf. p. x) will ever be pub-lished is not known. Earlier volumes containedthe dialects of bunsar (vol. i, 1976), some90 miles north-west of Isfahan, and of Gaz(vol. II, 1979), twelve miles north of the sametown. Eilers began his study of these dialects jin 1933 when he first went to the East, and he Icollected more material after 1936 as head of jthe German Archaeological Institute in jIsfahan. Supplementary field-work was doneafter 1939 and it is only this material whichsurvived World War II, and so could be usedin the present volume. Eilers was able to verifythis material during a short stay in 1976, andhe has of course also profited from the publi-cations of other investigators of the STvanddialect, namely, F. Andreas (Iranische Dia-leklaufzekhnungen, Berlin, 1939, repr. 1972),O. Mann (Kurdisch-persische Forschungen ml):Die Mundarten von Khunsdr, Mahalldt,Natdnz. Ndyin. SOmndn, Stvdnd und S6-Kohrud, Berlin, 1926) and last but not least,P. Lecoq (Le dialecle de Sivand, Wiesbaden,1979).The introductory pages here include a pref-ace (pp. vii-x), a list of sources and abbrevia-tions (pp. xi-xx), a map of the region (p. xxi),and seven colour plates that show the author'smain informant, 'AlT-Murad Burzu (and hisfamily), as well as STvand and its surround-ings. The introduction (pp. 1-33) gives generalnotes on the geography of Sivand, its name,the character of the informants, the contentsof the texts published here, and on the placingof the dialect of STvand. It is followed bywhat Eilers calls ' Grammatik des Dialektesvon STvand' (pp. 35-137), which contains anample commentary on phonetics (pp. 35-73),morphology (pp. 73-100), verbal stems(pp. 100-32), and a relatively short note onsyntax (pp. 132-7). The major part of thebook, however, comprises the texts and theirtranslations (pp. 139-300), followed by a glos-sary (pp. 301-52), a useful list of idioms(pp. 353-73), and addenda (pp. 375-6).As in the case of Eilers's earlier volumes,the main value of the present book lies in theintroduction, and especially in the texts giventhere, which are made accessible by the trans-lations and the detailed glossary, though thelatter seems to be incomplete and is sometimesdifficult to use because of the system of pho-netic transcription employed. The texts andtranslations are unfortunately not printed onfacing pages, which would have greatly facili-tated their reading and usefulness.Though the material used by Lecoq was col-lected in the seventies and is much more recentthan that collected by Eilers, the latter'sWestiranische Mundarten is by no meanssuperfluous. There are important differencesbetween the two publications, especially withregard to the linguistic treatment of the ma-terial. Eilers, in the tradition of his predeces-sors Andreas and Mann, uses a purely phonet-ic transcription to present the texts, thus

Review of 'Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum. Part III: Pahlavi Inscriptions. Vol. IV. Ostraca and Vol. V. Papyri. Texts I: Ostraca, Papyri und Pergamente: Textband by Dieter Weber'

Review of 'Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum. Part III: Pahlavi Inscriptions. Vol. IV. Ostraca and Vol. V. Papyri. Texts I: Ostraca, Papyri und Pergamente: Textband by Dieter Weber'

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