Peoples and Places in Pre-Islamic Afghanistan: The Evidence of the Bactrian Documents

NOTICE: Admission to the ISAW Lecture Hall closes 10 minutes after the scheduled start time

--Reception to follow

During the last 25 years, more than 150 documents in Bactrian, the principal administrative language of pre-Islamic Afghanistan, have come to light. In addition to revealing a previously almost unknown language of the Iranian family written in a variety of cursive Greek script, the decipherment of this substantial body of material promises to illuminate the political and social history of the region over a period of nearly half a millennium, from the early 4th to the late 8th century C.E. During this time, what is now northern Afghanistan came under the domination of a succession of rulers including the Sasanian dynasty of Iran, the nomadic Hephthalites, the Western Turks, and finally the Muslim Arabs and their allies. This lecture will survey the documents’ references to peoples and places, showing how these may be combined with evidence from coins and literary sources in order to contribute to our knowledge of this crucial period in the history of Afghanistan. In conclusion, the speaker will present an unpublished Bactrian contract, which contains many unusual features and probably originates from a region further south than any of the documents so far made known.

Nicholas Sims-Williams studied Iranian languages, Sanskrit and Syriac at Cambridge, receiving his PhD for a thesis on a miscellany of Christian texts translated from Syriac into Sogdian. In 1976 he joined the staff of SOAS, University of London, where he became Research Professor of Iranian and Central Asian Studies in 2004. His research focuses on Bactrian, Sogdian and other Middle Iranian languages of Afghanistan and Central Asia, and on the documents and Manichaean and Christian literature written in those languages. Recent publications include Bactrian documents from Northern Afghanistan (3 volumes, 2001–2012) and Biblical and other Christian Sogdian texts from the Turfan collection (2014). Current projects include a study of the chronology of the Bactrian documents and a trilingual (Sogdian–Syriac–English) dictionary to the Christian literature in Sogdian.