מכתב: BL OR 8212/166

תיאור

Letter in Judaeo-Persian. Dating: possibly eighth century. The letter concerns trade in sheep and other items, the ruler (ispahbud) of Tabaristan, cattle, slaves, strings of coins, horse-riding paraphernalia and various commercial transactions. The document is fragmentary; it was discovered in 1901 by Marc Aurel Stein in Dandan Uiliq (an archeological site in the Taklamkan desert, approximately 120km north of Khotan). Zhan Zhang, who is editing and translating the document as of 2021, describes the language as embryonic or Early New Persian, containing grammatical and/or lexical elements from Middle Persian, Sogdian, Hebrew, Arabic and Chinese.