Pis'mennye pamiatniki Vostoka

This article continues the introduced and commented publication of translated works of one of the founders of Shaykhism, Sayyid Kazim Rashti, from the collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The translation of this treatise, rendered for the first time into a European language, has been made from a manuscript and a lithography.

This study sheds light on one of the mysteries of the Old Testament, namely the plot from Genesis 14, which describes the campaign of a coalition of kings of the East (Chedorlaomer, Amraphel, Tidal, Arioch) into Palestine. The article demonstrates the process of forming these royal names under the influence of a cuneiform source known as the “Chedorlaomer Texts” and reveals its uniqueness. Along with this, the historical context that underlies the plot is revealed. In the course of the work, many new readings were revealed, carefully hidden by the Babylonian scribe. The problem of reading the last sign in the cryptogram KU.KU.KU.KU.GA₂ was solved, and a section of the cuneiform text was discovered in which, albeit somewhat unusually, a phonetically identical syllabic form corresponding to the biblical Amraphel is read. In addition to the analysis of proper names, a transliteration and a commented translation of the Chedorlaomer Texts into Russian are provided. The first part contains a translation of the text and an analysis of four names.

This article offers a cross-corpus lexical analysis of the semantic field of “immortality” in the literature of the Tamil siddhas. The material consists of a corpus of approximately 180 terms drawn from four corpora: Tirumular’s Tirumantiram, the texts of the kāya-siddhas, the poetry of the jñāna-siddhas, and the works of Ramalinga Swamigal. The article asks whether “immortality” functions in these texts as a single concept, or whether one translated label conceals several irreducible semantic configurations. Two analytical tools are employed: a functional typology of the lexicon (methods, substances, processes, results) and a diachronic analysis of semantic shifts as terms move from one corpus to another. The analysis shows that there is no single concept of immortality in this material. Instead, four distinct registers can be identified: the negation of death, the overcoming of time, bodily incorruptibility, and dissolution into light. The central lexical cluster of “body/form” reveals four mutually incompatible regimes: the body as temple, the body as laboratory, the body as abject matter, and the body as light. The functional typology shows that the corpora are not organized in the same way: the jñāna-siddhas are, in many respects, structured as a mirror opposite of the kāya-siddhas, while the Tirumantiram combines two different types of outcome. This makes it possible to treat the “siddha tradition” not as a single historically continuous whole, but as a later construction sustained by three mechanisms: the reinterpretation of older terms, the retrospective construction of genealogy, and lexical inversion. The analysis also identifies 22 verified anti-bodily lexemes from the poetry of Pattinattar and Pattirakiriyar, the systematic publication of which is envisaged as a separate study.

All traditional Chinese texts, from dynastic histories to verse and fiction, are full of names of institutions and positions. Meanwhile, in Russian Sinology there has not been and still is not a single dictionary of such terminology. This is even more unacceptable since in medieval China itself such names were selected very carefully and with great responsibility. In fact, the official titles in traditional China are the closest derivatives of the state ideology, allowing us to trace the changes and priorities of that ideology. Analysis of administrative names provides unique opportunities for studying this ideology and is the only way to create at last the long-awaited dictionary of such terminology, which is so lacking in Russian Oriental studies.

The Turkish text of the Ottoman tarih on a marble slab brought to Russia from the fortifications of the Ottoman fortress of Varna after the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829 and its Russian translation are published in the article. The author of the tarih was the famous Ottoman poet Izzet Molla Keçecizâde (1786–1829).