Beschreibung:

Document recording a grain delivery by Aspiy, made in part payment of a debt owed to Muzd, in Middle-Iranian language and Bactrian script, manuscript on leather with clay seal [northern Afghanistan (Bactrian kingdom of southern Transoxiana, perhaps the city of Rob in the valley of Khulm in northern Hindukush), dated 243 Sassanian era (probably 446 AD)] Single sheet with single column of 5 lines in curling Bactrian cursive script (in fact descendent from Greek cursive), with last line of duplicate copy above as well as hole for thong to tie up this copy (thus following the standard form of such commercial documents with two copies on a single sheet with one copy open and the upper rolled up and tied with thong), some small holes and tears, else good and robust condition, with clay seal with leaping animal, probably leopard (now unattached), in fitted cloth-covered case, the document 80 by 75 mm. This document dates to a century before the birth of the Prophet Mohammed, and is in a language of great importance to the history of the Iranian people Provenance: 1. The ancient archive of which this was once part, emerged piecemeal in the European and American art market throughout the 1990s, with the initial record that of Nicholas Sims-Williams note of his being shown reproductions of some of them while in London in December 1991. The present document appeared first in Sam Foggs catalogue 16 (1995), no. 12, for £15,000. The discovery of the corpus … [is of] primary importance for Iranian studies and far beyond, comparable only to the discovery of Middle Iranian manuscripts in Chinese Turkestan about a century ago (review of Sims-Williams publication in Indo Iranian Journal 58, 2015, p. 87). 2. Subsequently owned by the manuscript dealer Bruce Ferrini of Akron, OH., and from him to an American collector. Script and language: There is something exciting about scripts and languages which are so ancient and rare that knowledge of even their basic working forms has been forgotten by the modern world. Some await the discovery of their Rosetta stones, inscriptions or writings in two or more languages allowing comparison with a known language, while others like these, await the emergence of just enough samples to begin the painstaking job of decipherment. This was the case with the writings of the Bactrian kingdom of southern Transoxiana until c. 1991, with only a few coins, seals and inscriptions known until that date. Around that year a large cache of up to 150 documents emerged from a single archive (perhaps that of the ruler of the city of Rob: modern Ruy, in the valleys north of Bamiyan, dating from the fourth century AD-eighth century AD). Only once these documents had emerged could the Bactrian language and the strange script developed to commit it to writing be studied in enough detail to allow some understanding of it through comparison with its neighbouring Sogdian, resulting in N. Sims-Williams seminal publications: Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan I: Legal and Economic Documents, revised edition (Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum II, VI; Studies in the Khalili Collection 8, Nour Foundation, 2012, with the first of the present document here p. 15; and Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan II: Letters and Buddhist Texts, Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, II, IV, 2007, including the present manuscript). After the nomadic Kushanas people seized control of southern Transoxiana in the second century AD, they adopted the language of the native Middle-Iranian people of the region as an administrative tongue. Later in the middle of the fourth century, the rule of the Kushanas fell to the Hunnish tribe of the Chionites, but the Middle-Iranian roots of its culture endured, and under the command of their leader Grumbates its armies fought alongside the Persians against the Romans at the siege of Amida in 360 CE. The Hepthalites moved in from the north and took control in the fifth century, and the named individuals in both