Studies in Manichaeism

STUDENTS OF MANICHAEISM are familiar with the discoveries made at Turfan and elsewhere in Chinese Turkistan, in the years 1903 and following, which brought to light an extensive mass of Manichaean Fragments dating back a thousand years or more. These fragments, consisting of hymns, prayers, confessions, religious treatises, and the like, contain portions of the long-lost Bible of Mdni. The discoveries were due largely to the expeditions of Grtinwedel and Huth, Le Coq, Stein, and Pelliot. The more important of these fragmentary texts have proved to be written in a form of the Middle Persian language now usually termed Turfan Pahlavi, and in the Turkish of Eastern Turkistan, though a valuable treatise in Chinese has been made available, and also some Soghdian remnants. The first scholar to identify a mass of the fragments as Manichaean documents, written down in a variety of the Estrangelo script, and then to decipher them, was the brilliant Berlin professor F. W. K. Muller, in 1904.' Since that date the work of deciphering and translating the remains also in the other languages, together with the task of elucidating them, has been carried on esrez-ially by Muller, Le Coq, Salemann, Foy, Radloff, Andreas, Reitzenstein, V. Thomsen, Chavannes, Pelliot, Cumont, Alfaric, Legge, while contributory studies, on the linguistic side, have been made by Gauthiot, Meillet, Bartholomae, Geldner, and Tolman. Through the efforts of the discoverers and their fellow-workers we have therefore now available far more material for understanding Mdni's doctrines than was known centuries ago; and still more light on the subject may be expected in the future, when more of the fragments are published or new finds are unearthed. The present writer, being interested in the Zoroastrian el

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• Die Begegnung von Christentum und Buddhismus

  Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften•Die Begegnung Von Christentum,…•1986

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• Manichaean Responses to Zoroastrianism. (Politico-Religious Controversies in Iran, Past to Present

  Open Access•David Scott, D A Scott•Religious Studies•1989

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