Preface

doi:10.5871/bacad/9780197262856.002.0006

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Preface

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https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197262856.002.0006

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vii

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January 2003

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During the last ten years or so, the materials available for the study of the older Indo-Iranian languages have increased prodigiously. One thinks in particular of the sensational discoveries of birch-bark scrolls bearing Buddhist texts written in Gāndhārī in Kharoṣṭhī script and of Bactrian leather documents in cursive Greek script. At the same time, evolving techniques for the compilation, manipulation and dissemination of electronic text corpora and digital images have made it possible to exploit previously known data in new ways, whilst archaeological finds in India, Pakistan and Central Asia, including the sites of the ‘Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex’, have given rise to new hypotheses concerning the history and pre-history of the Indo-Iranian peoples.

The first object of the present volume, and of the symposium out of which it arose, was to bring together a select group of scholars, both linguists and archaeologists, to survey these exciting new developments and to assess their impact on our understanding of the history of the Indo-Iranian languages and their speakers. A second, no less important object was to pay tribute to the memory of a great pioneer in the Indo-Iranian field, Sir Harold Walter Bailey (1899–1996), who laid many of the foundations on which we are now attempting to build. Appropriately, the symposium began on 16 December 1999, the exact centenary of Sir Harold’s birth, with the first ‘Sir Harold Bailey Memorial Lecture’, given by one of his most distinguished pupils, Professor R. E. Emmerick. It was appropriate, too, that the symposium was sponsored by two organisations with which Sir Harold was closely associated: the Ancient India and Iran Trust, an educational trust based in Cambridge, which he helped to set up and to which he bequeathed his incomparable library, and the British Academy, of which he was a Fellow for more than half a century (1944–1996). By a happy chance, the proceedings of this symposium, inaugurated on the very day of Sir Harold Bailey’s centenary, have attained their definitive, printed form in the year in which the Academy celebrates its own centenary. I am sure that Sir Harold, who delighted in anniversaries and birthday parties (see below, p. 285), would have wanted to join me in taking this opportunity to wish the Academy ‘many happy returns’.

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