- 26 - 2003
- 1. Bibliographie, Recueils d’articles et Ouvrages généraux
- 1.3. Ouvrages généraux, histoire de la discipline
18
Sims-Williams, Ursula
« Forgeries from Chinese Turkestan in the British Library’s Hoernle and Stein collections ». BAI 14 (2000 [2003]), pp. 111-129, 17 figs.
This is a well-documented history, also based on archive materials, of how diplomats and archaeologists acquired in Chinese Central Asia fake manuscripts produced by Islam Akhun and his accomplices in 1895-1898 and presumably by some of his former partners in the early 1930’s. S.-W. deals with the forgeries in the British Library but also provides information on fakes acquired by institutions of other countries. Islam Akhun’s forgeries are imaginary imitations of manuscripts in formal Brāhmī (potentially Khotanese), Aramaic (initially thought to be Pahlavi), Uighur, Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic. Later forgeries imitate manuscripts in Brāhmī script, both cursive (on the model of Khotanese documents) and formal, at times used interlinearly. By way of comparison, the article also reproduces the Khotanese document Or. 11344/5, previously unpublished in facsimile (fig. 13). It may be added that in Or. 13873/56 (ca. 1895, fig. 4), one of the first forgeries in pseudo-Brāhmī sold by Islam Akhun, the text is arranged in four columns in clear imitation of the main manuscript of the Khotanese Book of Zambasta.

