Tibetan Inscriptions

Inscriptions are a rather neglected field within Tibetan Studies, because they are often located in places that are not easily accessible for both geographical and political reasons. It is thus especially welcome that two of the contributions to this volume deal with inscriptions documented on recent field trips to Tibet: Benjamin Wood discusses an inscription in Zha lu that relates an enigmatic conflict in the history of the monastery, and Kurt Tropper looks into an epigraphic cycle on the life of the Buddha in Tsaparang. Moreover, Nathan Hill provides a new interpretation of the beginning of the famous Rkong po inscription, and Kunsang Namgyal Lama surveys the various kinds of texts found on tsha tshas. An extra level of reflection is added to the volume by Cristina Scherrer-Schaub’s methodological considerations on the classification and interpretation of inscriptions.

Published in the year 2000, A Corpus of Early Tibetan Inscriptions is a valuable contribution to he field of Asian Studies.

Drawn and Written in Stone explores the religious history of the highest part of the TibetanPlateau through its rock art and inscriptions. It is focused on facsimiles ofritual and ceremonial monuments carved and painted on stone surfaces and rockinscriptions in the Tibetan language, vital archaeological and historicalmaterials for appraising the development of religion in Tibet, ca. 100 BCE to1400 CE. By probing the complexion of figures and letters in stone, this workconsiders how early cult traditions contributed to the establishment of TibetanBuddhism and a rival faith known as Yungdrung Bon. Outside of the Indiancultural context, relatively little has been written about the historicalantecedents of these popular Tibetan religions for a want of sources. Thismonograph helps remedy this large gap in Tibetan studies by drawing upon theauthor's surveys of rock art and rock inscriptions conducted in upmost Tibetbetween 1995 and 2013.

Old Tibetan documents are the oldest extant monuments of the Tibetan language. Their exploration, although successfully flourishing in the last two decades, has been considerably impeded by often unintelligible and obsolete vocabulary that was bound to the particular cultural and political context of the Tibetan Empire that collapsed in the 840s CE. The present publication aims at clarifying a part of this vocabulary by examining nearly 400 Old Tibetan compounds. In Part I an attempt has been undertaken to define a compound and to provide the first linguistic classification of Old Tibetan compounds. Part II concentrates on a lexicological analysis of the compounds and strives to explain their etymology, word-formation, and usage in Old Tibetan. Contents of Volume 1: Introduction, Indices, References, Part I: Compounding in Old Tibetan, Part II: Old Tibetan Compounds. Lexicological Analysis. Lexemes 1-119