Text, Place, and Time. The Historical and Philological Evaluation of the Early Judaeo-Persian Texts.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ludwig Paul
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: from 2014 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 259081461

When the proposal for the current project was submitted (in 2013), the corpus of Early Judaeo-Persian (EJP) texts included approximately 700 pages that were written from the 8-12 centuries CE with the Hebrew alphabet, in Iran and in various other places of the Near and Middle East (including Central Asia). Through recent manuscript finds, these figures have increased up to over 1.300 pages between 2014 and 2016. The EJP texts show a great variety of topics and themes, and are of utmost importance as sources for the study of Jewish-Iranian history, literature, and religion. Of particular importance is a complete account book of a trader's family from Bamian (Afghanistan), and parts of other account books. The language of the texts constitutes an important link for the understanding of the evolution of Persian.The extension project's aims, like that of the original 2013 project, are to provide a comprehensive investigation of the language and contents of all the EJP texts, and to publish the results of this investigation in the form of a monograph. The most important aspects of the investigation are: localising the texts in space and time, and evaluating all informations and terms that are historically relevant. The historical part will be taken over by a researcher from Jerusalem (supervised by Prof. Shaked), the linguistic part by a researcher from Hamburg (supervised by Prof. Paul). A snythesis of both parts of the investigation shall try to bring together the localisation of the texts with their linguistic and dialectal features.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel
• International Co-Applicant: Professor Dr. Shaul Shaked (†)