Olga Lundysheva and Anna Turanskaya
(The National Library of Russia)
Brahmi Glossing Practices in Old Uyghur Manuscripts: A Comparative Study
68th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Bangkok 2026
Brahmi glosses in Old Uyghur blockprints are well known and widely attested among archaeological finds from the Tarim Basin. By contrast, Brahmi glosses in Old Uyghur manuscript texts remain much less studied and, to date, are known only from a small number of isolated examples.
The most prominent manuscript of this kind is the Dišasvustik from the Serindia Collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In addition, a manuscript fragment with similar features is preserved in the Berlin collection and was published by Professor Peter Zieme in 2005.
The functional necessity of such glossing is beyond doubt: the Old Uyghur script does not accurately represent the phonetics of the Indian languages in which dhāraṇīs and mantras were recorded, for which precise pronunciation was of paramount importance.
As for the present paper, our focus will be limited to the codicological and palaeographical features of this glossing practice. Despite the limited size of the corpus, a comparison of the glosses in the manuscripts mentioned above appears to reveal a number of characteristic features.
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