The Syriac Script at Turfan. First Soundings

This is the first book dedicated to a palaeographic study of about a thousand fragments in Syriac and Sogdian languages discovered between 1902 and 1914 in the Turfan area, a site on the ancient Northern Silk Road. The unearthing of this manuscript material, probably dating between the late 8th and 13th /14th centuries, is extremely relevant from several points of view. This was, in fact, a crossroads region of different communities, languages and religions, which was also reached by the spread of the East-Syriac Christian community. Palaeographic factors such as form, modulus, ductus, contrast, spaces between letters and ligatures have been here examined. Particularly notable is a peculiar ligature of the letters ṣādē and nūn. Among other important considerations emerged from this work, we find the almost total absence of a monumental script in favour of mostly cursive forms, most of them East-Syriac cursive forms. These can represent a valuable source for the study of the history of the East-Syriac script because of the paucity of earlier and contemporary East-Syriac manuscript evidence from Middle East, at least until the twelfth century. Moreover, this research sheds light on some scribal uses that can be extremely relevant for a better comprehension of the Sogdian and Syriac-speaking Christian communities, for the history of writing between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages and for a greater understanding of the social context and in which these and other communities in the same area read, wrote, and shared handwritten texts. This study is part of the FWF-Stand-alone project ‘Scribal Habits. A case study from Christian Medieval Central Asia’ (PI Dr. Chiara Barbati).