Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples (review)

With no other recent volume on Iranian in English, the present volume, which originated as a centennial tribute to the distinguished Iranologist Sir Harold W. Bailey (1899–1996), and whose publication helps mark the centenary of the British Academy, partly fills this gap. It was apparently planned as a survey of early Indo-Iranian (or, as some contributors still say, Aryan) philology (43), but unfortunately has no chapter on Old Persian. The chapters are in roughly chronological order, bracketed by a pair of memoirs by students of Bailey’s, themselves deceased. Ronald E. Emmerick’s (1–17) is a not entirely laudatory professional biography, and Ilya Gershevitch’s (285–96), a ninetieth-birthday tribute, focuses on his library and his gardening.

J. K. Mallory (19–42) and Asko Parpola (43–102) present not entirely compatible interpretations of the archeological evidence for Indo-Iranian prehistory. Almuth Degener (103–17) considers the classification of the Nuristani languages, assigning them to the same branch as Indo-Aryan and attributing their Iranian-like features to lengthy contact with ‘Proto-Iranian’. Jost Gippert’s article on Avestan (165–87) discusses the nature of the available materials, stages in the transmission of the text, the new database his team is preparing, and the inevitability of relying on Vedic for interpretation. Alexander Lubotsky (189–202) attempts to track the elusive Scythians through Avestan and Old Persian. Nicholas Sims-Williams (225–42) discusses the newly-acquired Bactrian documents (dated 342–781 ad) which ‘began to appear in the bazaar of Peshawar and in the international art market in the early 1990s’ (no reservations are expressed about using unprovenanced, presumably looted materials) and considers what loanwords are able to reveal about ‘invaders’ of ancient Afghanistan. Achaemenid, Greek, Kushan and other Indian, Buddhist, Sasanian, Chinese, Turkish, and even Arabic and Persian influences are identified.

All three chapters on Indo-Aryan languages concern their relation to Buddhism. Richard Salomon (119–34) discusses the Gāndhāri language of the newly discovered fragmentary texts he has been studying in recent years. K. R. Norman (135–50) considers the old question ‘What language or languages did the Buddha speak?’ within a survey of the language(s) of the Pāli canon. O. von Hinüber (151–64) deals with the vocabulary of Buddhist Sanskrit. Frantz Grenet’s chapter (203–24) is a strictly historical account of the Kidarite and Hephthalite periods (ca. 430–748) in Central Asia and northwest India. Finally, Georges-Jean Pinault (243–84) thoroughly studies relations between the Tocharian and Indo-Iranian linguistic areas, though citing only his own contribution to Victor Mair’s Bronze Age and Early Iron Age peoples of eastern Central Asia (JIES monograph 26, Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 1998). My own review of that volume (Sino-Platonic Papers 98.4–46, Jan. 2000) attempts a synthesis on the ‘Tocharian’ ‘mummies’ ‘of Ürümchi’.

The volume is beautifully typeset by the editor. There are no indices.