Rocznik Orientalistyczny/Yearbook of Oriental Studies

The article presents the results of the discovery and text-critical analysis of the Mongolian language “golden” manuscript fragments brought to Russia and Europe from Dzungaria in the 18th century. At present 34 fragments have been detected in various depositories. The fragments belong to one set of the Mongolian Kanjur most likely dated from the first half of the 17th century. The list of the texts, to which the fragments belong, is given at the end of the article. The text-critical analysis of the fragments reveals that they contain a plethora of preclassic orthography and spelling of loanwords. Three fragments contain the text of the hitherto unknown Mongolian version of the Bhadrakalpika-sūtra, which differs from Dayičing Tayiǰi’s translation included in the bulk of the Mongolian Kanjur copies.

Etymologies demonstrate complexity of semantic changes that the Maltese words underwent as well as reflect the local history and lifestyle of peasants dwelling in rural areas of Malta and Gozo. In such way the words may be considered as a reservoir of the collective memory of Maltese people. Strikingly, the Maltese language, though Semitic in its grammar, semantically seems to be attached more to the Romance word. It is manifested not only in the preponderance of Sicilian words in Maltese dictionaries, but also in the transposition of some semantic structures mirroring the internal development of Romance languages. In the article the following Maltese terms were discussed: mgħażqa, zappun, minġel, xatba, rixtellu, minġla, ranċila, romblu tad-dris, midra, luħ, mannara, lexxuna.

In 2010, three Polish scholars published A Preliminary Report on the Wanli Kanjur Kept at Jagiellionian Library, Kraków.1 It was at this time the world began to know that the Jagiellonian Library has an incomplete collection of the Tibetan Kanjur printed in the Wanli period (1573–1620), as well as many other Tibetan texts, manuscripts and xylographs.2 The library also possesses a huge collection of Chinese Buddhist literature, including the Yongle Northern Canon. There is also a scripture that does not belong to the Chinese Buddhist Canon, or Daoist Canon, or Baojuan ����.3 In June 2017, the author discovered one volume of the Buddhist text entitled Saddharmapuṇdarīka Sūtra in the Tangut language. This is particularly precious as it is the only extant copy worldwide. These volumes of the Tibetan Kanjur and the Yongle Northern Canon were obtained by a German scholar and collector named Eugen Pander (1854–1894?) who got acquainted with the reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist Master Thu’u bkvan Khutugtu of Yonghe Temple in Beijing. The volumes were shipped to Berlin around 1889 where they were placed in the Museum of Ethnography in Berlin and later moved to the State Library in Berlin. In 1943, the Allied Forces began to bomb Berlin and the Germans made an effort to hide their treasures. They transported over 500 boxes of books from the State Library in Berlin to Książ castle, and then to the Cistercian monastery in Krzeszów. After WWII the region was on the Polish side of the border. All the treasures, including Beethoven’s manuscript of the “Ninth Symphony,” and the Mozart’s manuscript of “Magic Flute,” were transferred as a deposit to the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków.

The collection of the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw contains significant objects representing the culture of peoples from many regions of Asia, including Polynesia, Indonesia and even Papua New Guinea. The cultures of Turkish and Mongolian peoples of Central Asia are richly represented among them. Among the objects of these regions and cultures, a collection of felt products significantly distinguishes itself. However, these felts have never been exhibited as a whole collection, nor as a part of a monographic exhibition dedicated to the craft of felt. A significant part of them belongs to the earliest collections from the 1990’s from Afghanistan. It represents many different cultural groups: Turkmen, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz people and even Tajiks. From the historian’s or art historian’s point of view, it is a very young and new collection. But, taking into account the specifics of felt production and the ways it is used, as well as the fact that felt is rather underestimated by its producers, users, traders, researchers and collectors (in terms of the art market), it should be noted that felt products were rarely bought and collected by esteemed institutions. Apart from museums of Tsarist Russia, and later, their heirs: Soviet and post-Soviet museums in Central Asian countries, along with some western European museums, collections of felt products are rather rare in the world. The felt collection of the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw appears to be a rare example here. The aim of this paper is to present the felt collection of the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw, in terms of its objects, as well as its ethnographic and historical value.

Photographs from the Archive of the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw were taken by Eugeniusz Helbert and Ewa Soszko-Dziwisińska.

Photographs from the author’s archive were taken by Marzena Godzińska.

The pattern of collection, which characterizes the classical Indian though in general, may serve as a strongly persuasive literary device. In that role it is often employed in Sanskrit grand narratives, specifically, in Hindu epics, purāṇas, and ornate epic poems (mahākāvya). The study seeks to examine the conceptual grounds, figurative realisations and persuasive ends of this pattern in Jinasena’s (9th century CE) Ādipurāṇa, an important text of the Digambara Jain tradition. Jinasena’s work represents the genre of Jainpurāṇas, which combines and modifies the generic properties of the afore mentioned Sanskrit grand narratives.

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to the life and tales of Abdelaziz El-Aroui1 (1898–1971), a well-known Tunisian storyteller. He was above all a journalist and a playwright. He was also an active member of the literary group Taht Essour. His tales were transmitted by Tunisian radio and later by TV. Their popularity spread to neighboring countries, especially Algeria and Libya. This popularity derives from his practice of drawing upon traditional sayings, stories and proverbs and from his intention to associate his work with the Tunisian dialect and to penetrate the depth of the human soul.

This paper discusses the question of how the old Kazakh custom of the ban on uttering the name of a husband and his male relatives by his wife is still observed in modern Kazakhstan. To do this, material from five main regions of Kazakhstan (North, South, Central, East and West) was collected and analysed. The study aims to do a sociolinguistic analysis of the result of the questionnaire. Although this old tradition is well known and described a long time ago by such researchers as Nikolaj Ilminskii, Nikolaj Grodekov, Ybyraı Altynsarın, Grigorij Potanin, Aleksandr Samoilovich and others, no modern fieldwork was done to check whether this tradition is still alive and how it changes. As is known, present-day Kazakhstan had changed significantly since the 19th century, when Ilminskii first studied the Kazakh language and traditions, Wilhelm Radloff and the researchers mentioned earlier, who were linguists and explorers. However, many cultures are still observed. As Grodekov noted, the avoiding of the pronunciation of a husband’s name and his male relatives by his wife is familiar to the Kazakhs and Kirghiz. Somoilovich, basing on Mustafa Shoqaı’s materials, devoted a paper to this question. Perhaps the best story was related by Altynsarın, who has registered an anecdote how a woman who went to bring water and saw a wolf killing an ewe rushed back to her house and shouted for help, transforming the words ‘lake’, ‘reed’, ‘wolf’, ‘sheep’ and ‘knife’, since her husband and his male relatives bore names composed of these words.

Józef Kowalewski, a founding father of Mongolian studies in Russia, stayed in Beijing from November 1830 until July 1831. He stayed with the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission and, being a Catholic himself, Kowalewski was very interested in the history and current state of Catholicism in China. In those years Catholicism in China faced severe persecution. All European missionaries were expelled from China with the exception of Bishop Gaetano Pirès Pereira, who was allowed to stay at the Russian Mission because of his old age. Kowalewski is said to have written a history of Catholicism in China which was destroyed by fire. However, unpublished diaries of Kowalewski, which survive in the Russian archives, contain much interesting information about Catholic cemeteries in Beijing, the life of Chinese converts, the Jesuit library and records of his talks with the last Catholic bishop.

The present paper describes the Manchu Collection in the Jagiellonian University Library in Cracow which was a part of the former Prussian State Library in Berlin. The historical Manchu collection comprised over 300 items (call numbers, including “duplicates” of the same title). The paper offers a historical sketch of the forming of the collection as well as short description of some interesting items.

This paper addresses the questions that were left unanswered in my previously published works on the Mongolian translations of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. It shows that the five earliest Mongolian translations of the sutra were based on the Tibetan version known as gzo sbyangs, suggesting that in the first half of the 17th century the gzo sbyangs version, which is a rarity today, dominated the transmission of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā in Mongolia and was later replaced by the widely spread phreng ba can version. Two of the early Mongolian translations have preserved a rare Tibetan colophon. Currently this colophon is known to have survived in a unique Tibetan manuscript kept at the Otani University, Japan. The colophon declares that the sutra was edited by several figures of the snga dar period, whose identities are under question.

The aim of this paper is to explain the meaning of two mural fragments housed in the Central Asian Collection of the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The two mural fragments under discussion, nos. III 9023a and III 9023b–c (Pl. 1, Fig. 1), were brought to Berlin by the 4th Turfan Expedition in the year 1914 from the Buddhist cave monasteries in Kizil in the area of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road, today’s Province Xinjiang, an autonomous region of the Peoples Republic of China. The murals show peculiar waterscape with persons trying to cross it; they can be compare with similar representations from the area of Kucha.

The article is devoted to the world’s first popularizers of the nō theatre outside Japan, with particular emphasis on the pioneering achievements of two Americans, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853–1908) and Ezra Pou nd (1885–1972), as well as the next generation representing various European countries. The latter included, among others, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Paul Claudel (1868–1955), Jacques Copeau (1879–1949), Charles Dullin (1885–1949), Jean-Louis Barrault (1910–1994), Gabriel Cousin (1918–2010), Edward Gordon Craig ( 1872–1966), Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) and Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), who, influenced by the fascination with the nō theatre, were the first to reform, in a more or less visible way, the traditional, realistic European theatre.