The first researcher of the Manichaean texts kept in the Asiatic Museum was it director (from 1890 to 1916) Academician Carl Germanovich Salemann (1849–1916). From the beginning of the 20th century up to his demise, he studied the Manichaean texts from Eastern Turkestan in the Middle Iranian languages: Middle Persian, Parthian and Sogdian. The collection of the Asiatic Museum (IOM RAS) included a considerable number of fragments of Manichaean texts in those languages, as well as in Chinese and Uighur...
In 1960 the participants in the International Congress of Orientalists in Moscow were offered an excursion to Leningrad. During the trip, two Sinologists (one of them from a western country, the other from the East) visited the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of the Peoples of Asia of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences) and discovered for themselves the collection of manuscripts from Dunhuang, of which nearly nothing had been previously known abroad.
The Tangut Collection of the IOM RAS originated from the dead city called Khara-Khoto by the Mongols, Heishuicheng by the Chinese and Ejina by the Tanguts themselves. The ruins of Khara-Khoto are located at a distance of about 40 km from the aimag (district) Ejina of the Autonomous Province of Inner Mongolia in the People’s Republic of China.
The Arabic language spread all over the former Islamic State from the Atlantic Ocean to the banks of the Indus. The advent of Islam, therefore, marked a crucial stage in the history of the Arabic language. Contacts between the Arabic world and modern Europe in the 18th/19th century left major imprints on the Arabic language and converted classical Arabic into modern Arabic. Also Arabic grammar and lexicography went through different stages of development in the last centuries.
Orhon scripts should be named according to the place they are discovered. The discovery of the monuments bearing these scripts enables the founding and development of ancient Turkish studies. An atlas of all the monuments with Orhon scripts is urgently needed. To study these monuments requires interdisciplinary and international collaboration.
There is a rich literary heritage in Persian from the sixteenth century. Of the prose works, history and biography is the most notable from this period, whilst poetry was also extremely important. There was a literary culture in Pashto too, as well as in the Indic languages of Pakistan and north-western India; namely, Kashmiri, Panjabi, Sindhi and Hindustani.
The introduction and spread of Aramaic in Central Asia was of central importance in the diffusion of literacy, being used as an administrative language at the court of the Achaemenid Empire (sixth to fourth century BC). The language spoken on a daily basis by the peoples of this region however is far more difficult to assess, as are the languages spoken by the Southern Saka tribes who moved into this region.
There remains much to be discovered about the languages and literature of the Kushan Empire, to the extent that a new language in an unknown script has been discovered recently. Sanskrit and Prakrit are both literary languages that pre-date the Kushan Empire, whilst Bactrian developed to become a ‘literary’ language in this era. Sogdian is also important, spoken by the merchants who were engaged in the silk trade and who thus traversed Central Asia.
The development of languages is a fluid process, and the emergence of linguistic identities in Central Asia from the second millennium BC does not disguise the fact that many of these languages were originally closely related. Modern Indian languages descend from Pakrit and Sanscrit (among other ancient languages), whilst the languages spoken in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan stem from Middle Iranian languages, including Middle Persian, Sogdian, Parthian and many others.
