Melanie Malzahn Books

In June 2013, Tocharian Texts in Context, the first international conference on Tocharian manuscripts and Silk Road culture, was held at the University of Vienna. Studying the two Tocharian languages and their historical and cultural background is impossible in isolation; cooperation with neighbouring disciplines is absolutely necessary. Tocharian Texts in Context for the first time brought together experts from these various fields. This volume is a collection of twenty-three papers that have originated from this conference. The topics of the contributions range from Tocharian philology and linguistics to studies on Sanskrit, Old Uyghur, Middle Iranian, historical and archaeological research on the region where Tocharian was spoken, and the history of Silk Road Studies. This broad scope makes the book indispensable for anyone studying Tocharian and its cultural context.

This anthology consists of ten papers dealing with Tocharian philology. They provide information on the expeditions leading to the establishment of the collections of Tocharian manuscripts, descriptions of and concordances to those collections, an index of translations and a bibliography of text editions. Two further papers are concerned with the Tocharian script; providing, for the first time, a complete chart of its single signs; the other one a study on its development and establishing an inner chronology of the Tocharian texts. The final section presents texts edited here for the first time.