The Tocharian Manuscripts of the Turfan Expedition from the Staatsbibliothek

Berlin Project Representative: Jost Gippert, University Frankfurt, Germany

Description:

The State Library of Berlin owns more than 3000 Tocharian manuscripts that were discovered by the three Prussian expeditions to Turfan, located in the present day Hsinkiang area on the Silk Road. They contain mostly Buddhist texts, but comprise also other text genres.

Within the present project, about 75% of the manuscripts have been scanned, and about 25% have been transliterated and transcribed with reference to existing printed editions. The resulting internet database, stored on the TITUS server, shows the transliterated texts in combination with the graphic images scanned from the original manuscripts. Full annotation of their contents will be supplemented at a later stage.

Plans for further development include further scanning (also of manuscripts from the Sanskrit collection of the Berlin Staatsbibliothek) as well as annotating and internet publishing of a database which contains bibliographic information. Further on, linking to other sources of Buddhist texts that are comprised in the TITUS collection (Khotanese Saka, Sogdian) and in other EBTI collections is aimed at as well. For the whole corpus (Tocharian A and Tocharian B), a bilingual dictionary will be compiled which will give references to the equivalent Buddhist terms in Sanskrit (and, in a second step, in other languages, too).