One Thousand and One Conjectures

Zheng Xuan (鄭玄, 127-200) annotated the classics at the moment the jinwen (今文, New Text) and guwen (古文, Old Text) recensions were fusing, and his commentaries are a deliberate reservoir of the losing readings. Glossing the Three Rites and the Odes, he…

The received Laozi (老子 / Daodejing, in the Wang Bi 王弼 recension) presents itself as a fixed 81-chapter text in the order Dao jing then De jing, but the excavated witnesses show that this stability is a late achievement of transmission, not…

Chen Shou's Sanguozhi (陳壽 三國志, c. 289) is a terse history; the reason we know the Three Kingdoms in depth is Pei Songzhi's commentary (裴松之, presented 429), which does not gloss the text so much as flood it with rival sources -…

The Dongguan Han ji (東觀漢記, Dongguan Han ji), compiled at the imperial Dongguan through the second century, was once canonical: with the Shiji and Hanshu it formed the San shi (三史, Three Histories) that Tang candidates studied. Then Fan Ye's Hou Hanshu…

The Fūyō wakashū (風葉和歌集, Fuyo wakashu, c. 1271) is a court-style waka anthology with an unusual rule: every poem is lifted from a monogatari (物語, courtly prose tale). It gathers verse from on the order of two hundred named tales - and…

The Samguk sagi (三國史記, Samguk sagi, 1145, Kim Busik) is the oldest surviving Korean history, and it is a survival census in its own right, because it names its sources - and almost all of them are gone. It cites earlier native…

The transmitted imperial bibliographies record the writing that elites valued - classics, philosophy, rhapsody, history - and are structurally blind to the writing that dominated actual production: the pragmatic paperwork of administration. The Hanshu Yiwenzhi (漢書藝文志) has no division for statutes, ordinances,…

Almost everything we securely know about Tangut written culture comes from a single hole in the ground: the ruined fortress-town of Khara-Khoto, emptied by P. K. Kozlov's Russian expedition in 1908-1909 into what is now the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St…

The Jin dynasty gave the Jurchen two scripts — a large script promulgated in 1119 under Wanyan Xiyin and a small script added in 1138 — and a state apparatus to feed them: the Jin shi records an academy translating the Chinese…

Bactrian — the only Iranian language ever written in Greek script, the administrative tongue of the Kushans and their successors — was a written language for the better part of a millennium, yet until the 1990s it was known almost entirely from…

The German Turfan expeditions of 1902-1914 carried tens of thousands of manuscript fragments back to Berlin, of which the Old Uyghur portion is among the largest single deposits of a medieval Inner Asian literature. But a fragment is not a book. The…

Mani (216-274) did what almost no founder did: he fixed his own canon in writing, seven scriptures meant to be copy-controlled against the corruption he blamed for every earlier revelation — the Living Gospel, the Treasure of Life, the Pragmateia, the Book…

On the western steppe two literate-adjacent states — Khazaria and Volga Bulgaria — are richly described and barely self-attested. Almost everything narrated about them is outsider prose: Ibn Fadlan's eyewitness report of the 921-922 Baghdad embassy, the Balkhi-school geographers (al-Istakhri, Ibn Hawqal)…

The Sogdians were the great middlemen of the Silk Road, and their surviving literature is almost entirely somebody else's religion: Buddhist sutras from Chinese, Manichaean hymns, Christian lectionaries from Syriac — translation corpora serving the three imported churches of the diaspora. Native…

The Church of the East reached deep into Inner Asia — its patriarchs appointed metropolitans for Samarkand, for Kashgar, eventually for the Ongut on the Yellow River — but almost the entire manuscript record of that vast mission comes from the book-refuse…

The Mongols kept an official dynastic record — the Altan Debter, the Golden Book, a Mongol-language chronicle guarded in the imperial treasury — and it is lost without a single leaf. We know it existed because two great derivative histories draw on…

The Old Turkic runiform script is famous for the imperial monuments of the Orkhon, but a second and larger epigraphic province used the same alphabet very differently: the Yenisei basin, where over a hundred inscriptions cluster — and almost every one is…

In the sands south of the Taklamakan, at Niya and Loulan and Endere, Aurel Stein dug up close to a thousand documents on wood and leather written in Kharoshthi script and Gandhari Prakrit — the language and script of the far northwest…

Khotanese, the Middle Iranian Saka language of the southern Silk Road kingdom of Khotan, has left a real corpus — but almost all of it is translation (Buddhist sutras rendered from Sanskrit) and documents (the kingdom's administrative paperwork). Original Khotanese literature, a…

The Turfan finds are usually treated as a preservation success, but the collection is itself a depleted sample of what was excavated, because a second loss fell on it in the twentieth century. The German expeditions brought back not only manuscripts but…

Beside Khotanese there was a sister Saka language, Tumshuqese, spoken around Tumshuq (Toqquz-Sarai) on the northern rim of the Tarim — and its entire surviving textual record is a small body of documents and religious fragments, few enough that a scholar can…

Khwarezmian, the Eastern Iranian language of the Khwarazm oasis on the lower Oxus, is one of the best-attested-yet-least-surviving languages of Inner Asia — a paradox the sources resolve. Its early record is thin (coin legends, ossuary and document scraps in an Aramaic-derived…

The oldest substantial body of Turkic poetry is not a book of poems; it is the example sentences of a dictionary. Mahmud al-Kashgari compiled the Diwan Lughat al-Turk at Baghdad in the 1070s to teach Arabic-speakers the Turkic of the Karakhanid world,…

The first great monument of Islamic Turkic literature, Yusuf Khass Hajib's Qutadghu Bilig (Wisdom that Brings Fortune), was completed at Kashgar around 1069 — a long mirror-for-princes in Turkic verse, the proof that the new Islamic Turkic culture could carry philosophy and…

When Colonel Louis Archinard took Ségou in 1890 he seized the library that al-Hajj Umar Tall's Umarian state had assembled — some four thousand Arabic manuscripts — and shipped them to Paris, where they entered the Bibliothèque nationale and were fully inventoried…

Before the Timbuktu chronicles of the seventeenth century, the earliest securely dated written record of the Middle Niger and its Saharan approaches is not on paper but on stone: the royal funerary stelae of Gao-Saney and the grave and rock inscriptions of…

The Dīwān of the sultans of Kanem-Bornu — the girgam, a bare king-list with reign-lengths and mothers' names for the Sayfawa dynasty running back centuries — is the spine of pre-colonial central-Sudanic chronology, and it reached modern scholarship through the narrowest possible…

Old Kanembu is a language known almost entirely as handwriting between other lines. It survives as the archaic Kanuri-Kanembu idiom used for interlinear and marginal glossing (tarjama) of the Qur'an and core Arabic texts in Borno, documented in Dmitry Bondarev's corpus of…

Colonial and early post-colonial catalogues of West African manuscripts were built by Arabists, for Arabic, with a 'language' field that in practice meant Arabic; African-language texts in Arabic script — Hausa and Fulfulde Ajami above all — were routinely swept into the…

Wolofal — Wolof written in Arabic script — carries a large devotional and didactic literature, above all the Murid and Tijani poetic corpus of authors such as Moussa Ka, Mor Kayre, and Serigne Mbaye Diakhaté, documented in Fallou Ngom's Muslims beyond the…

The Vai syllabary of Liberia is one of the very few scripts whose birth is documented in real time: S. W. Koelle, who investigated it in 1849 (Narrative of an Expedition into the Vy Country), recorded that it had been invented about…

In 2012-13, when armed groups occupied northern Mali, a reported three hundred thousand or more Timbuktu manuscripts were evacuated to Bamako in metal footlockers by Abdel Kader Haidara's network under SAVAMA-DCI, and when the occupiers withdrew they burned manuscripts at the state…

Christian Kongo was a literate state from the early sixteenth century: King Afonso I (Mvemba a Nzinga, r. c.1509-1543) and his chancery produced a stream of letters, and Kongo Christianity generated catechisms, sermons, confraternity records, and school texts — the 1624 Doutrina…

Old Nubian is a fully literary language with almost no original literature. Its known literary corpus — edited chiefly by Gerald M. Browne (Old Nubian Texts from Qasr Ibrim; Literary Texts in Old Nubian) and registered in the Database of Medieval Nubian…

Harar, the walled Muslim city of the eastern Ethiopian highlands, was for centuries a centre of Islamic learning with its own manuscript culture — Arabic scholarship plus a distinctive religious literature in Old Harari written in Arabic script, catalogued and studied above…

The Beta Israel (Falasha) of Ethiopia possessed a religious literature in Geʿez — the Teʿezaza Sanbat (Commandments of the Sabbath), Nagara Muse, the Death of Moses, the Book of Angels, prayers and Sabbath texts — distinct from the dominant Christian Geʿez tradition…

The Pate Chronicle, the dynastic history of the Nabahani rulers of Pate in the Lamu archipelago, is a foundational source for the northern Swahili coast — and it has no early manuscript. It exists only in several divergent recensions written down or…

In southeastern Madagascar the Antemoro and neighbouring groups wrote Malagasy in Arabic script — the sorabe ('great writings') — for genealogy, history, divination (sikidy), medicine, and magic, a manuscript tradition held by hereditary scribal families (katibo) and studied since Gabriel Ferrand (Un…

Written Swahili has almost no dated anchor before the eighteenth century, and its earliest fixed point is a translation: the Hamziya, a Swahili rendering of al-Būṣīrī's Arabic Hamziyya whose composition is dated 1652 (attributed to Sayyid Aidarus), while the oldest surviving dated…

A large stratum of classical Geʿez literature is not Ethiopian composition but translation from Arabic, made during the Solomonic centuries (thirteenth to fifteenth): the law code Fǝtḥa Nägäśt from al-Ṣafī Ibn al-ʿAssāl's Arabic nomocanon, the Zena Ayhud from the Hebrew-via-Arabic Josippon, the…

The leaders of the Sokoto jihad were bibliographers of themselves: Usman dan Fodio, his brother Abdullahi, and his son Muhammad Bello each compiled lists of their own writings, and the reference bibliography of the region (Arabic Literature of Africa II, Hunwick and…

Rudaki (Abu Abdallah Ja'far Rudaki, d. c. 329/941), the first master of Persian court poetry under the Samanids of Bukhara, is credited by the later biographical tradition with a colossal output: the tazkiras and Jami repeat figures on the order of a…

Daqiqi (Abu Mansur Daqiqi Tusi, killed c. 366/976) began a versified Book of Kings for the Samanid court and had completed roughly a thousand couplets - the Gushtasp-nama, the coming of Zoroaster and the wars of Gushtasp - when he was murdered…

Awfi's Lubab al-albab (لباب الالباب), compiled c. 618/1221 in Sind on the eve of the Mongol storm, is the oldest surviving comprehensive tazkira of Persian poets - a biographical anthology that names several hundred poets from the Samanid dawn to the compiler's…

The Mongol conquest of Khurasan and Transoxiana - Bukhara, Samarqand, Balkh, Marv and Nishapur sacked in 1220-1221, their populations massacred and their libraries destroyed - fell on the very region that had produced the first three centuries of Persian poetry. The transmission…

Unsuri (Abu'l-Qasim Hasan Unsuri Balkhi, d. c. 431/1039) was amir al-shu'ara, poet laureate, at the court of Mahmud of Ghazna, the most powerful literary patron of the age, and presided over a workshop of court poets. The tazkira tradition assigns his divan…

Survival among the early Persian poets is not merely low, it is radically unequal, and the shape of that inequality is a fingerprint of the filter that produced it. Take every poet Ganjoor assigns to the period before the Mongol conquest and…

Shams-i Qays al-Razi's al-Mu'jam fi ma'ayir ash'ar al-Ajam (المعجم فی معاییر اشعار العجم, early thirteenth century), edited by Qazvini, is the great medieval treatise on Persian prosody, rhyme and poetic criticism. Like every technical handbook it argues by example: to illustrate a…

The ruba'i, the Persian quatrain, is the most portable and least anchored unit of the tradition: four lines, easily memorized, easily detached from any author, easily re-attributed. Around Umar Khayyam (d. c. 517/1123) this produced the tradition's most notorious attribution cloud. Khayyam…

The women poets of the Persian tradition are attested across the tazkiras and histories - Rabi'a Balkhi (Rabi'a bint Ka'b al-Quzdari, tenth century), Mahsati Ganjavi (twelfth century, mistress of the ribald quatrain), Padishah Khatun and Jahan Malik Khatun (thirteenth-fourteenth centuries), and a…