Sims-Williams, Nicholas. 2025. Bactrian Documents IV: Documents from South of the Hindukush, I (Part II Inscriptions of the Seleucid and Parthian Periods and of Eastern Iran and Central Asia, Vol. VI Bactrian). London: Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum. With a contribution by Frantz Grenet.
Following on from the three volumes of Bactrian documents from Northern Afghanistan (BD1-3), the present volume primarily contains the edition of a collection of fourth-century letters written on birchbark in a place which cannot be located precisely but which was evidently somewhere to the south of the Hindukush, in what is now Southern Afghanistan or Pakistan. One eighth-century document written on parchment is also included on the grounds that it is also known to come from the south of Afghanistan , almost certainly from a place named Khesh between Bamiyan and Kabul.
From the preface
Readers of this blog will be familiar with Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum (CII) and the many volumes published in the series on inscriptions and documents in Iranian languages. The CII forms part of the academic infrastructure at SOAS, where it has its own page (linked above and here). A list of publications is provided below.
The Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum is a UK-based organisation of scholars from around the world that aims to publish a comprehensive and permanent record of Iranian inscriptions, defined in the broadest sense, up to the early Safavid period.
From CII’s website
The aim of the work includes inscriptions and documents (as opposed to literary texts) in Iranian languages, whether actually found in Iran or elsewhere, and those in non-Iranian languages if they were found in Iran or are versions of texts also occurring in an Iranian language.
The image above is of ‘Bactrian letter “cp”, courtesy of Professor Sir Nasser D. Khalili’, found on CII’s website.