Studies in the chronology of the Bactrian documents from Northern Afghanistan
- Submitting institution
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School of Oriental and African Studies
- Unit of assessment
- 31 - Theology and Religious Studies
- Output identifier
- 25981
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
- ISBN
- 9783700181842
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This volume is the principal outcome of an AHRC-funded research project (2004-8), the aim of which was to establish the relative and absolute chronology of ca. 150 recently discovered documents in Bactrian, the previously almost unknown administrative language of pre-Islamic Afghanistan. Some of these documents are dated, but in an era whose starting-point was unknown; others are undated. The first stage of research involved interpreting the script and language of the documents and examining them for references to events and persons identifiable in other dated or datable sources. Such references made it possible to fix the starting-point of the era within a range of 10 years, within which range 223 C.E. was shown to be historically plausible. On the basis of a detailed examination of the prosopography of the documents, as well as their palaeographical and linguistic development, a relative chronology was established for most of the undated documents. Other important pieces of research documented in the book include a study of the numeral signs in the Bactrian script, a new edition of a group of inscriptions from Pakistan, including their versions in Arabic and Bactrian, as well as studies identifying most of the places named in the Bactrian documents and the regions in which the different groups of documents were written. The result as a whole is a new chronological and geographical framework for the history of pre-Islamic Afghanistan, which will allow the Bactrian documents to be fully exploited by historians and numismatists.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -