Sunday, May 08, 2016

Silk Road manuscripts at the Getty

EXHIBITION: L.A.’s Getty Center re-creates ancient China Cave Temples. This sounds like a stretch for ancient Judaism, but the late-antique-to-early-medieval hoard of manuscripts found in the caves at the Silk Road site of Dunhuang did include Jewish and Christian materials, including (not mentioned in this article) Syriac texts. Past posts on the Dunhuang cave manuscripts and related matters are collected here.

The Silk Road site of Turfan (Turpan) is also in Northwestern China and it has come up as the place where medieval Manichaean (Manichean) manuscripts, including a version of the Book of Giants, were excavated at around the same time as the caves of Dunhuang. Past posts mentioning Turfan and its manuscripts are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.