On two forgotten fragments from Sempalatinsk once held by Giessen University Library
(66th Annual Meeting of the PIAC Göttingen, 2024)
Over the past decade, renewed attention has been paid to the Tibetan and Mongolian manuscripts and manuscript fragments discovered at Sempalatinsk and Ablaikit in the early eighteenth century. The major part of this corpus is conserved in Saint Petersburg but several discrete folios were sent to savants and curious scholars in various parts of Europe. To date, fragments have been identified in Sweden (Linköping), Germany (Berlin, Halle, Wolfenbüttel, Kassel), France (National Library and National Archives), England (British Library) and Scotland (University of Glasgow). Following on from the author’s presentation at the 2021 PIAC of newly identified fragments among the papers of Joseph Nicolas Delisle in the French National Archives, this paper draws attention to two further fragments – not previously included in twentieth century studies of this corpus, quite possibly in part because the Mongolian fragment is misdescribed as being written in Manchu. These two manuscript fragments were once held by Giessen University Library but were destroyed in Allied bombing during the second war. However, the library’s 1840 catalogue includes not only descriptions of the fragments and their provenance but also facsimile reproductions of their first lines. This paper presents a transcription and translation of these first lines and situates them within the context of the history of the Oirat monasteries of Sempalatinsk and Ablaikit and their libraries.