This volume contains edited versions of the contributions to a colloquium held at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities on the 30th and 31st of March 2006 with the title: ‘Literary materials and their form in the Middle Iranian period. Colloquium in honour of the 70th birthday of Prof. Dr. Werner Sundermann’. The colloquium was dedicated to a topic localised in the Sasanian Empire and on the Silk Road and concentrating on the first millennium CE. The contributions deal in particular with the re-occurrence of individual motifs and concepts in the various strands of the literatures in the Middle Iranian languages. Besides selected aspects of the tradition of the Avesta, of learned women in Middle Persian legal discourse, of the Alexander novel in Pahlavi literature, and of Buddhist texts such as the Saka ‘Book of Zambasta’ and the Sogdian Vessantarajataka the main focus is on the dispersal of narrative works by the Manichaeans through Middle Iranian into Old Turkish literature und even as far as China. Complementing this are contributions on the Aramaic and Mandaic traditions and the first comprehensive edition of the much discussed Manichaean Bactrian fragment. A possible Iranian-Celtic literary influence is also discussed.
The contributions are in English (11), German (9) and French (1).