Re-examination of the Tangut fragment Or. 12380/3495 from the collection of the British Library

Abstract

Among all discovered Tangut written monuments there are known to be 31 fragments (including five very small pieces that are broken off from larger fragments) of Tangut texts where Tangut characters are supplemented by their phonological transcription in Tibetan writing. The Tibetan transcription provides straightforward information on the pronunciation of Tangut characters, and hence plays a key role in the phonological reconstruction of Tangut. The fragments in question are now preserved in two collections, 19 fragments and five small pieces of them are in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg, and five fragments are in the British Library at London. As we have already reported in 2009, two fragments which were originally in the Russian collection have been lost, and only photographs of them belonging to Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky (1892–1937) are preserved among his archive materials kept in the Archive of Orientalists of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (copies of these photographs are preserved in the British Library as well). The aim of this paper is to provide a re-examination and new description of one of these fragments, preserved at the British Library with pressmark Or. 12380/3495. This fragment has been studied in detail by several Tangut scholars (Arakawa 2008, Tai 2008, West 2011), but some of the questions concerning it, like meaning of the Tibetan writing at the top left edge, remain unsolved and have become the focus of our research.