Gandhari (Gāndhārī; Devanagari : गंधारी) is one of the Central Indian languages - prakrit . Gandhari is best known for its inscriptions and manuscripts made using the Indian Kharoshtha script . The last monuments on Kharoshthi in the territory of Gandhara belong to the III century , in East Turkestan - to the VII century . The further fate of the gandhari is not exactly known; it is assumed that it was eventually supplanted by the Pashto , which was spoken by the tribes who settled in the Middle Ages from the Suleyman mountains located south of Gandhara.
| Gandhari | |
|---|---|
| Self name | Gāndhārī |
| Country | India (modern Afghanistan and Pakistan) |
| Regions | Gandhara |
| Extinct | V century |
| Classification | |
| Category | Languages of Eurasia |
Indo-European family
| |
| Writing | kharoshthi |
Territory
It was distributed in the extreme northwest of Hindustan - in the valley of the Kabul River, in the Gandhara region, which was located on the territory of modern northern Pakistan ( NWTC ) and northeastern Afghanistan . In addition, Gandhari manuscripts are also known from other regions of the distribution of the Kharoshtha letter, in particular from East Turkestan .
Gandhari Buddhist Manuscripts
Until recently, the only known Gandhari manuscript was a birch bark scroll, discovered in 1893 in Kokhmari Mazar near Khotan in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China , on which the Dhammapada was recorded. However, in recent years, a large number of fragmentary manuscripts with recordings of Buddhist texts have been found on the territory of Gandhara itself (Afghanistan and Pakistan). They include [1] :
- 29 fragments of birch bark scrolls from the collection of the British Library ,
- 129 palm leaf folio fragments from the Martin Schøyen Collection , 27 palm leaf folio fragments from the Hirayama collection and 18 palm leaf folio fragments from the Hayashidera collection,
- 24 birch bark scrolls from the Senior collection,
- 8 fragments of a single birch bark scroll and 2 small fragments of another scroll from the collection of the University of Washington.
Linguistic characteristic
Like all prakrit, gandhari comes either from the Vedic language or from a closely related dialect.
It is not known whether Gandhari was the mother tongue of part or all of the population of Gandhara, or it was only a means of writing. It is assumed that the gandhari reflects the features of other languages of the region, both Indo-European ( Dardic and East Iranian), and pre-Indo-European (possibly related Burushaski).
Old Indian jñ- simplified into gandhari in ñ- .
Gandhari also influenced mixed forms of Gandhar hybrid Sanskrit.
Notes
- ↑ Saloman 2006.
See also
- Gandhāran buddhist texts
Literature
- Detailed Bibliography of Gāndhārī Studies
- Gankovsky Yu.V. Peoples of Pakistan. Stages of ethnic history. M., 1964.
- Bailey, Harold W. Gāndhārī // BSOAS 11 (1943): 765-97.
- Brough, John. The Gāndhārī Dharmapada . London Oriental Series 6. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
- Glass, Andrew. A Preliminary Study of Kharoṣṭhī Manuscript Paleography . MA thesis. Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington, 2000.
- Saloman, Richard. A Gāndhārī Version of the Rhinoceros Sūtra: British Library Kharoṣṭhī Fragment 5B . Studies in Gandhāran Buddhist Texts 1. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.
- Saloman, Richard. Recent Discoveries of Early Buddhist Manuscripts // Between the Empires, Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE . New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-19-568935-8