{"id":59920,"date":"2023-07-31T22:57:17","date_gmt":"2023-08-01T03:57:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=59920"},"modified":"2023-09-21T20:49:37","modified_gmt":"2023-09-22T01:49:37","slug":"central-asian-kharosthi-script-on-an-ancient-knife-hilt-found-in-austria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=59920","title":{"rendered":"Central Asian Kharosthi script on an ancient knife hilt found in Austria"},"content":{"rendered":"

Astonishing demonstration of East-West interaction during Roman times (with an equally mind-boggling demonstration of the occasional, yet horrendous [defying common sense], ineptitude of AI translation):<\/p>\n

\"Geheimnis um Messergriff aus dem r\u00f6merzeitlichen Wels gel\u00fcftet<\/a>\"<\/p>\n

Ein vor \u00fcber 100 Jahren entdeckter Elfenbeingriff mit r\u00e4tselhafter Inschrift aus dem antiken Ovilava geh\u00f6rte wohl einst einem Besucher aus dem fernen Asien<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

\"The mystery of the Roman period Wels knife handle revealed\"
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

An ivory handle with a mysterious inscription from ancient Ovilava discovered more than 100 years ago probably once belonged to a visitor from distant Asia<\/span><\/p>\n

Thomas Bergmayr, Der Standard (7\/28\/23)<\/p>\n

Before presenting the remarkable findings reported in this important article, just a short prefatory note about the AI translation of the title.\u00a0 Three of the main online\u00a0multilingual neural machine translation services\u00a0(Google Translate, Baidu Fanyi, and DeepL) mistranslated \"Wels<\/a>\" (the eighth largest city in Austria [ancient Ovilava]) as \"catfish\" (only Bing Translator got it right).\u00a0 Given the object that we're dealing with, that is a genuinely bizarre rendering of the word, especially since the material of the handle is identified as ivory and the artifact as coming from Ovilaval in the subtitle.\u00a0 (It is all the more perplexing that three of the four services are consistent in making the same strange mistake [well, not so strange after all, since \"wels\" really does mean catfish in German].)\u00a0 Fortunately, the machine translators do a better job in the body of the article, where there is more context.<\/p>\n

For the purposes of the rough translation of the German article, I have relied mainly on GT, with occasional assistance from the other translation services, and some good old human input from my own brain.\u00a0 Please bear in mind that the translations proffered below do not pretend to be polished, flawless English renderings of parts of the German article, but only to give a functionally useful idea of its content.<\/p>\n

N.B.:\u00a0 Two photographs of the knife handle are provided near the bottom of this post.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The complete English translation of the article:<\/p>\n

It was probably the convenient location that prompted Rome to turn the probably former Celtic nest on the left bank of the Traun into a Roman settlement in the second half of the 1st century AD.\u00a0What was later to become the Upper Austrian Wels was raised to the status of a city barely half a century later under Emperor Hadrian, who reigned from 117 to 138 AD, and its full name was Municipium Aelium Ovilava.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Three traffic routes formed an important junction at this Traun crossing: A road led from here via today's Eferding to the Danube Limes to Passau;\u00a0the so-called Noric Main Street came from the south and continued to the north, and the third traffic route was the east-west connection along the Danube towards Iuvavum, which is now called Salzburg.\u00a0It is easy to imagine that the foreign visitor whose possessions were to cause a stir some 2,000 years later came to ancient Ovilava via one of these routes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Strange characters<\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1918, during excavations in Wels north of today's Salzburger Stra\u00dfe, parts of the original Roman east-west connection and the remains of buildings south of it were uncovered.\u00a0It may have been a Roman metal workshop, but one cannot be absolutely sure.\u00a0Among the artefacts uncovered from the 2nd century AD there was also an unusual find: a piece of ivory that turned out to be a knife handle without a blade and eked out an anonymous existence in the depot of the Wels-Minoriten City Museum for decades.\u00a0It was not until the 1990s that the current curator of the Stadtmuseum, Renate Miglbauer, rediscovered the good piece.\u00a0She had it restored and it ended up in the museum's permanent archaeological exhibition.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is special about the handle is an incised portrait on the back and characters, of which only one thing could initially be said with certainty: they are not Roman or Greek letters.\u00a0The origin of the knife handle therefore remained a mystery, even if certain hypotheses were already circulating.\u00a0The city archaeologist at the time, Ferdinand Wiesinger, guessed the oriental-Egyptian region as the place of origin.\u00a0Other experts, on the other hand, believed in a Middle Persian origin and a connection with the Mithraic cult.<\/span><\/p>\n

An Indologist solves the riddle<\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

But what the archaeologist and ancient historian Stefan Pfahl from the Heinrich Heine University in D\u00fcsseldorf, together with a colleague, was able to find out about the knife handle goes far beyond these earlier assumptions, and not just geographically.\u00a0\"After a few dead ends, I was able to narrow down the potential linguistic area from which the knife inscription came so far that I was finally able to find the right specialist to solve this puzzle,\" the scientist told STANDARD.<\/span><\/p>\n

The man's name is Harry Falk, he is an Indologist emeritus at the Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin and a specialist in ancient Indian languages.\u00a0Falk actually managed to identify the scratched character string as the ancient Indian script\u00a0Kharosthi<\/a>\u00a0– and he was able to translate it: the inscription shows that the knife was once an honorary gift for a man named Tadara.\u00a0Literally it says: \"Honour-giving gift for Mr. Tadara\".\u00a0Who presented the knife to Tadara remains unclear, but the face carved into the end of the handle could well represent the honoree himself, Pfahl said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Local dialect from the Taklamakan<\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0According to the scientists, these findings, which will be published in the \"Archaeological Correspondence Journal\" in the next few weeks, have very exciting, if not sensational, consequences: Based on the special variant of Kharosthi, a local dialect called Khar, Falk locates the origin of the\u00a0knife\u00a0and its owner with high probability in Niya, an important trading center on the southern branch of the Silk Road.<\/span><\/p>\n

The city in the western part of the Taklamakan Desert is long gone, having been destroyed by severe drought and lack of water in the first centuries AD.<\/span><\/span> Their remains are now on the territory of the People's Republic of China in the autonomous region of Xinjiang.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A unique artifact<\/b><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0This makes the knife handle a unique find, because no other known object from this Central Asian region made it this far west in the early Roman Empire.\u00a0The previous record holder was a sword carrying handle from the Taklamakan desert, which was found in a Thracian chief's tomb in \u010catalka in Bulgaria.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"The fact that Rome maintained trade relations with distant Asia is by no means new,\" said Pfahl.\u00a0\"This is suggested by the numerous Roman gold and silver coins found in India.\"\u00a0However, these goods, such as silk, only rarely survived the centuries in Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Visit from far away Asia?<\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Pfahl believes that the knife from the Taklamakan was not likely to have been traded.\u00a0Because the gift inscription on the handle only makes sense in the geographical area where it was read and the language understood.\u00a0It is therefore more likely that Tadara, who is immortalized both by name and probably figuratively, brought the knife to Roman Ovilava himself as his personal possession.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The background of this massive, around 6,000-kilometer journey along the Silk Road is left to the imagination.\u00a0Perhaps Tadara wasn't the only visitor from the Far East who found his way to ancient Wels thanks to the favorable location of this Roman city.\u00a0(Thomas Bergmayr, July 28, 2023)<\/span><\/p>\n

Photographs<\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nFoto: Stadt Wels
\nDer Elfenbeingriff eines Messers wurde vor 105 Jahren auf dem Gebiet der r\u00f6merzeitlichen Stadt Ovilava entdeckt. Eingeritzte Zeichen stellten die Forschenden lange Zeit vor ein R\u00e4tsel.
\nThe ivory handle of a knife was discovered 105 years ago on the territory of the Roman city of Ovilava.\u00a0Carved characters puzzled researchers for a long time.<\/span><\/small><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nFoto: Stadt Wels
\nAuf der R\u00fcckseite des Griffes wurde das Portr\u00e4t eines Mannes eingeritzt. Nachdem es sich bei dem Messer um ein Ehrengeschenk handelte, k\u00f6nnte das Bild durchaus den einstigen Besitzer zeigen.
\nA man's portrait is carved on the back of the handle.\u00a0Since the knife was an honorary gift, the picture could well show the former owner.<\/span><\/small><\/p>\n

Reflections<\/b><\/p>\n

Aside from my Austrian heritage, there are many reasons why I [VHM] personally am so deeply interested in and moved by this fascinating discovery.\u00a0 Harry Falk, the Berlin scholar who deciphered the inscription, ia a friend.\u00a0 Hiroshi Kumamoto, a specialist on Khotanese, who told me about it, was one of the first Ph.D. candidates on whose committee I served when I arrived at Penn.\u00a0\u00a0 Petya Andreeva is a more recent student whose dissertation focused on Scythian art — from Bulgaria (her homeland) to China (not to mention that she is part Chinese) — during the same period as the knife handle in question, and note that Bulgaria is named in the Standard\u00a0<\/i>as the location of the previous record holder for a Central Asian artifact in Europe.\u00a0 Finally, because I have been to Niya, the probable origin of\u00a0 the Wels knife hilt, several times, I have an affinity for the place.\u00a0 One of the deepest impressions left on me was when I stumbled upon the remains of a nail factory far out in the desert where the town used to be.\u00a0 Another was encountering denizens of the modern town of Niya to the south of the archeological remains who looked like they could have come from Kansas.<\/p>\n

Selected readings<\/b><\/p>\n