Tibetan Obsolete Mortuary practices and afterlife Beliefs. Language conservatism of religious writings in the service of Proto-Bodish reconstruction

TOMB (Tibetan Obsolete Mortuary practices and afterlife Beliefs.

Language conservatism of religious writings in the service of Proto-Bodish reconstruction) aims to yield a range of new contributions to our understanding of the Old Tibetan language and funerary practices on the Tibetan Plateau by investigating ancient records concerned with non-Buddhist funerary rituals.

In addition, the project will uncover important linguistic links to other regional language communities and will establish the first testable hypotheses about the genetic relationship of Tibetan languages. The synchronic perspective of the philological study will be complemented with historico-linguistic analysis.

TOMB will specifically focus on translating documents from the Old Tibetan funerary corpus that have never been translated before.

These manuscripts are remarkable for several reasons: 1) they provide insights into funerary rituals that did not survive beyond the Tibetan Empire; 2) they reflect elements of ritual culture shared with other non-Tibetan speaking groups in the region; 3), they offer evidence of earlier, pre-historical stages of the Tibetan language; and 4) they give us an opportunity to enhance our understanding of Tibetan languages and to uncover their genetic links to related languages.

Through a comprehensive analysis of the corpus from both historical and text-linguistic perspectives, we will gain insights into archaisms that can be identified as features of pre-historical Tibetan. This foundational work will set the stage for reconstructing Proto-Tibetan.

Identifying and describing these features will in turn contribute to the reconstruction of Proto-Bodish, the presumed ancestral language of Tibetan, East-Bodish, and Tamangic languages.

The innovative approach to ritual textual sources as reservoirs of pre-historical linguistic forms tackles thus far unexplored fields of research and promises to enrich our understanding of the Tibetan non-Buddhist religious culture.