The Characters that shaped the Silk Road - A Database and Digital Paleography of Tarim Brahmi

The textual material of Sanskrit, Tocharian, and Khotanese written in a Central Asian variant of Brahmi unearthed in the Tarim Basin is scattered over different collections, and most of the corpora of the involved languages are neither electronically accessible nor machine-readable. This stood in the way of comparative philological and linguistic investigation of the languages and, most importantly, has rendered a comprehensive paleographical investigation
of Tarim Brahmi impossible.
It is the goal of this project to present a database and digital paleography of Tarim Brahmi. It will bring together all material written in Tarim Brahmi accompanied by transliterations digitized in a TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) standard together with the photos of the texts and all relevant information about them. The project will develop various digital tools including a search engine that will make the combination of linguistic, philological, and paleographic parameters possible. It will use an innovative approach linking the transliteration of a given text with its digital image and annotating hard-to-quantify features of the text. This will be combined with a computer-aided analysis of the entire paleographic data. With these tools in hand, the project’s goal is to use digital humanities, big data, and other quantitative approaches to create a digital paleography of Tarim Brahmi. This will allow the identification of individual scribes, scribal schools, as well as regional and diachronic variants of Tarim
Brahmi. This information is vital to the philological and linguistic study of the languages involved.
Almost all texts of the languages written in Tarim Brahmi are in a fragmentary state. Knowing what was written, by whom, when, where, and how is a key to the identification and categorization of the thousands of fragments too small to be assigned to specific texts and manuscripts by conventional methods. The project will make it possible to piece together these fragments based on objective and quantifiable paleographic criteria. This will in turn advance the linguistic study of the involved languages by supplying new texts, contexts, lexical items, and morphological forms. Dating and localizing all texts will elucidate the regional, social, and diachronic stratification of the relevant languages and their relationship to each other.
The mentioned parameters together with philological information on the types of texts in the different languages will shed light on the distribution of genres in space and time, which in turn will lead to a more detailed knowledge of the transmission of early Buddhism in Central Asia and, via the Silk Road, to China.
The project will be carried out by the linguist and Central Asian scholar Hannes A. Fellner and an international team of scholars of linguistics and Digital Humanities.