Saka Document VII: the St. Petersburg Collections. Ed. By Ronald E. Emmerick and Margarita Vorobyova-Desjatovskaja. “Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum”, London, 1993.
This volume contains facsimiles of the Khotanese manuscripts in the collections of the St. Petersburg Chapter of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, at last providing all scholars access to the original texts of these unique monuments of Central Asian culture. Some of the texts have already been made known in transliteration and some have been mentioned in Orientalist publications as early as the end of the last century, but only one major text from these collections has hitherto been published in facsimile: the main manuscript of the Buddhist compendium, formerly known as the Saka manuscript “E” and now known as The Book of Zambasta (Vorob'ev-Desjatovskij and Vorob'eva-Desjatovskaja 1965). Apart from this manuscript, all known Khotanese manuscripts in the St. Petersburg collections are now being published either here or as an appendix to the forthcoming text volume.