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Verification of old manuscripts1/17/2024 This reveals that the manuscript continued to be used for different ends long after the texts were copied by members of a family for the sake of commemorating their deceased kin.In focus: Law on Amendments to the Law on Verification of Signatures, Manuscripts and Transcripts More importantly, however, the separate pieces allow us to gain an insight into the different stages of the manuscript's life between its initial production and its internment in the Dunhuang library cave. This paper is able, for the first time, to reconstruct most of the original manuscript by identifying two pieces of this missing first quire in other collections of Dunhuang manuscripts. In its current form, the manuscript consists of four quires tied together, although it is also clear that at least one quire is missing from the beginning. This is a small multiple-text manuscript booklet from the tenth century, probably produced by several family members in collaboration with each other as part of the series of rituals commemorating the dead. It is through analyzing the interrelation of the texts and panels that we begin to uncover the complex process of the manuscript’s creation and the different layers of time and locations.Īmong the group of Dunhuang manuscripts in the codex form is S.5531 from the Stein collection at the British Library (London). The panels comprising a typical scroll often came from different locations and were written decades or more apart. An additional lesson is that in many cases manuscripts are composite objects the components of which had a history of their own. The analysis reveals that there is no automatic answer to this problem, and the decision has to be made on a case-by-case basis. One of the main questions is whether the date in the colophon refers to the time when the text was carved into stone or the moment of creating the manuscript copy. This paper looks at dated copies of stele inscriptions among the Dunhuang manuscripts, in an attempt to demonstrate the inherent difficulties in dating and establishing provenance for such copies. It is less commonly recognized, however, that manuscript copies were also routinely made from non-handwritten material, such as printed works or stone inscriptions. Modern observers tend to simplify the complex process of textual transmission and imagine that in a manuscript culture texts were handed down by scribes copying manuscripts in a long line of succession extending for generations. The book makes contributions to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads. As a result, it was much less ‘Chinese’ than commonly imagined in modern scholarship. The central argument is that the manuscripts attest to the unique cultural meakeup of the region during this period, exhibiting-alongside obvious Chinese elements-a heavy influence of Central Asian cultures. This study centres around four groups of manuscripts from the mid-ninth to the late tenth centuries, when the region existed as an independent kingdom ruled by local families. Their number is in the tens of thousands, and they are written in over twenty different languages and scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and Sanskrit. The manuscripts have been discovered in 1900 in a sealed-off side-chamber of a Buddhist cave temple, where they had lain undisturbed for almost nine hundred years. Dunhuang Manuscript Culture explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the network of medieval routes known today collectively as the Silk Roads.
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