British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
A HUNDRED YEARS OF DUNHUANG, 1907-2007
Abstracts
The Impact of the finds at Dunhuang on Tibetan Studies
Professor Tsuguhito Takeuchi, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
The finding of Old Tibetan texts from Dunhuang had a great impact on Tibetan studies. The newly discovered Dunhuang texts and those from Central Asia enabled to restore the Old Tibetan Empire from legend to history. After nearly a century of scholarly endeavours, Old Tibetan studies have reached a new stage. Thanks to the development of research projects, such as cataloguing, databasing and digitizing, we now have a much broader view of Old Tibetan texts as a whole. Extensive analyses of accumulated textual database are revealing chronologically and sociolinguistically diverse aspects of Old Tibetan texts: namely, many Old Tibetan texts were produced by non-Tibetans in post-imperial 10th c. in multiethnic social milieux. In this paper, I will attempt to introduce some of the recent findings obtained as a result of such ongoing researches.