Vol 17, No 4 (2020)

Due to the publication of N. Pchelin and S.-C. Rashmann “Turfan manuscripts in the State Hermitage —a rediscovery” was published (2016), it became obvious that some some fragments of manuscripts and blockprints in different languages originally discovered during the four German Turfan expeditions (1902–1914) and later housed in the Museum für Völkerkunde (Berlin) for exhibition reasons, are preserved nowadays in the depot of the State Hermitage Museum. The present article deals with two Old Uyghur fragments of Sitātapatrā dhāraṇī blockprinted during the Yuan era. This paper presents codicological description of the fragments, and transcription, transliteration, translation and facsimiles of the preserved parts of text

According to the doctrine of so-called docetic Christology, earthly Jesus and heavenly Christ were two different persons; it was Jesus who suffered on the cross, Christ just entered Jesus’ body for a while and abandoned it before his death on the cross; consequently, the suffering of Christ was mere appearance. On the basis of some passages from Gnostic texts containing examples of docetic Christology, the author attempts here to trace the origin of that concept, starting with the New Testament (Pt. 1: Synoptic Gospels); in this part of the article, he deals with Paul’s and Deutero-Pauline letters (Pt. 2). To be continued.

The Toledo Quran is the only manuscript in Aljamiado containing the full Quranic text. Manuscript T 235 differs from others by its significant number of marginalia in Arabic, Spanish and Aljamiado. The text is divided into parts—prayers, muqaṭṭa‘a, brief corrections, notes to the text—and features decorated letters and drawings. Marginalia are written in black and red ink. The distinguishing feature of the Toledo Quran is that red ink, while being used for the decorative purposes, has a wider range of significance (for instance, to highlight the sura’s title and the ayat order). The particularity of Quran in Aljamiado is the inclusion of exegetical comments, usually borrowed from tafsirs, into the text corpus. These comments are highlighted in red in the Toledo Quran.

Thus, the ink color of marginalia on the whole coincides with that of the text, without taking into consideration the usage of red ink in marginalia on pages 1–105r inclusive. The numbers of ḥizbs are in red as well as those of ayats. This color is used for decorative purposes.

The inconsistent usage of color for juz’s numbers allows us to make an assumption that the scribe could have made the decision about using the color in his own manner, without basing its usage on that which is employed in the manuscript he copied. Furthermore, the inconsistency in juz’s designation leads to a conclusion that text division was not copied from the original manuscript but introduced by the scribe. The corrections of exegetical comments are written in red as well as the comments.

The article introduces the letters of the Professor of the Kiev University, Sanskrit scholar Fyodor Ivanovich (Friedrich) Knauer (1849–1917) sent by him to his colleague, philologist Vladimir Nikolaevich Peretz. They are now housed at the Personal Fund of V.N. Peretz in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI. Fond 1277. Inv. 1. F. 35). This set of letters is undoubtedly of great importance because, among other things, we have no other surviving epistolary heritage of the scholar. Revealing the author’s personality, the letters (there are only 21 of them) acquaint us to some extent with his inner world. Until recently, F.I. Knauer’s biography, especially the years of his exile, was full of blank spots which we can finally fill. The entire sequence of events relating to Knauer’s arrest, up to his arrival in Tomsk and life in Siberia, is presented by him as an uninterrupted narrative. The letters give us an idea of relations between the scholar, when he was out of favor, and his colleagues, friends, common people, local and higher authorities. They provide reliable documentary evidence of the terrible misfortune of a sincere person, who fell victim to a complicated political period.

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