Written Monuments of the Orient

The article introduces three previously unknown fragments of 17th c. Mongolian Kanjur manuscripts. While the original folios have been lost, their texts are preserved in handwritten copies produced in the 19th c. by an unidentified German scholar. These copies became known in 2021 after being admitted to the Manuscript Department of the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This article focuses on the Mongolian text of the fragments, its identification, and a brief commentary on the trustworthiness of the handwritten copies.

This article examines the first volume of Roshia Ibun 魯西亜異聞 [Unusual Narrative about Russia], a unique handwritten manuscript which depicts the story of a Japanese guard, Torizō. He was one of four Japanese guards who spent the winter of 1806 on the Sakhalin island monitoring the situation at Kushunkotan settlement. Lieutenant Nikolai Aleksandrovich Khvostov visited this settlement during his first expedition to Sakhalin in 1806. In his logbook he gave it an interesting name “Lyubopytstvo”, which can be translated into English as “Curiosity”. Curiously enough, this was the place where Khvostov and the four Japanese guards met for the first time. It is considered to be the first military clash between the countries and a turning point of Russian-Japanese relations, since Russia subsequently began to be perceived as a dangerous enemy. The first volume of the source gives especially valuable information about these events. It provides a detailed description of the voyage of the four Japanese captives to Kamchatka on board of a Russian ship, contains important information about the events during the second expedition of Khvostov and Davidov to Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands in 1807 and relates the trip of the four Japanese guards back to Japan. The first volume of Roshia Ibun, which has never been translated into Russian nor published yet, gives us answers to the following questions. Who was the guard Torizō? How did he perceive the meeting with the Russians in 1806? Were there any official messages or demands from Russian officers? How did Torizō manage to get back to Japan and did he have a chance to share his story with anyone else along the way?

Armenian polemical literature with Muslims from the early modern Ottoman context is very scarce. Unlike in Safavid Persia, public debates were not encouraged in the Ottoman Empire. Official polemical treatises from the Armenian milieu are lacking; little has survived in the historiographies, neo-martyrological accounts, and poetry about how Miaphysite (non-Chalcedonian) Apostolic Armenians positioned themselves within the cohabitation system of Ottoman society. Even less has survived in Armenian sources about popular Muslim religious practices. Therefore, a brief account of this matter provided by the 17th c. Armenian Constantinopolitan historiographer Eremia Kʻēōmiwrchean acquires great importance. The present article aims to explore the information provided by Eremia on popular Muslim religious practices, not only because it is a rare material preserved in the Armenian sources but, most importantly, because it reveals the topics of religious debates between Christians and Ottoman Muslims in everyday life.

During the archaeographical fieldwork in August 2024 in the village of Bezhta (Republic of Dagestan), the collection of the Dagestani scholar, the naib of the Caucasian Imamate Sultanmuhammad al-Bezhti, was explored, described and digitized. Sultanmuhammad al-Bezhti, also known as Sultan-dibir, was a founder of an entire dynasty of scholars and public and political figures (among them are his sons, Kebedmuhammad and Abdulmazhid). The collection consists of classical works by Arab-Muslim authors, which were available in every Dagestan private manuscript library. However, each of these manuscripts contains a lot of important and valuable information that expands our understanding of the history and culture of this region. These include numerous glosses found in the margins, between the lines, on the flyleaf, and on the first and last pages of the manuscripts. The last page of the manuscript turns into a family chronicle, which fixes important events from the lives of relatives. Most often, copiists or manuscript owners preferred to leave such notes on the colophon page.