Dr. Brandon Dotson: “On the Paleography and Orthography of Early Tibetan Writing”
12 June 2013
Photo: Orna Almogi
Over the past decade or so, there has been an upsurge of interest in the methods for describing and studying Dunhuang manuscripts, Tibetan inscriptions, and other early Tibetan documents. This is due in part to two trends that now hold sway in this field of scholarship. The first trend is a movement beyond the tradition of fine-grained studies of individual texts or groups of texts, and towards a synthesis of previous scholarship and an overarching view of the Dunhuang collection. The second is an attention to the physicality of the manuscript as an object existing within a social context.
This second trend in scholarship has seen philologists turn their hands to paleography in order to identify scribal hands, define styles of Tibetan writing, and attempt to fix in time some of the manuscripts that are currently undated. Individual scholars have been describing Tibetan writing and documents in their studies of individual texts and inscriptions for decades, of course, and in the process they have identified many of the important features to which one must attend. Building upon such research, I shall describe a systematic approach to the paleography and orthography of early Tibetan writing that includes index letter typologies and quantifiable features for measuring both orthography and ductus. These methods, while derived from work with early Tibetan writing, are also relevant to later Tibetan writings, including, of course, Tibetan Buddhist documents.
- Click here to download the invitation (PDF)
June 12th, 2013 - 18.00h
Universität Hamburg, Hauptgebäude,
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Raum 118
Free Entrance.