Abstract (eng)
This thesis is an attempt to catalogue traces of music and performance culture in Khotanese texts—and to place these in a philological context. After situating the question in wider assumptions about texts (and how they were used in the past), Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of the Khotanese language and the texts through which it is known. Chapter 2 'Lexical evidence' is a glossary of words in Khotanese that relate to music, performance or just sound. Each word is treated for its meaning, which is not always clear, through attestations, examples with interlinear glosses and an etymological discussion drawing on wider literature in Indo-Iranian and -European studies. Chapter 3 'Typologies' is an attempt to build on this study of the lexicon by drawing up a wider musical typology of music as drawn the textual sources. This follows a gradient, beginning with the material culture (named musical instruments), through specific images, formulas and metaphors, and ending with some more philosophical questions. Given the nature of the Khotanese corpus, which is, above all, Buddhist, an emphasis is placed on tracing these things through the wider Buddhist literature which leads, most often, to early Pali sources. The main conclusions in presenting the material like this are that (1) Khotanese literature is full of references to music; (2) much of this must be understood in its Buddhist context as (2a) part of an inherited Indic imaginaire and (2b) as part of a religious practice that understood texts as cult objects, but that (3) an indigenous Iranian musical culture shines through the texts and merits further study. This thesis hopes to contribute a minimal foundation to that more interesting work.