MONUMENTA TIBETICA HISTORICA
Abt. III: DIPLOMATA, EPISTOLAE ET LEGES (Hrsg. von Prof. Dr. Dieter Schuh und Dr. Christoph Cüppers)
Band 10: Charles Ramble: Tibetan Sources for a Social History of Mustang, Nepal. Vol. 1: The Archive of Te. Part 1-2. XVII, 646 Seiten, 2008, 118,50 Euro.
This volume is one of the outcomes of the Nepal-German Project on High Mountain Archaeology, which ran from 1992 to 1997 under the direction of Professor Dieter Schuh. The sixty-five documents presented in this work represent the Tibetan component of the archive of Te, a settlement of some 300 people situated in Nepal ’s Mustang District. Covering a period from the late seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the documents provide a rare insight into the day-to-day affairs of a Himalayan community: perennial boundary disputes with neighbouring settlements, poignant accounts of thwarted romance, chronicles of regional warfare, rules governing the use of scarce natural resources, and stories concerning the migrations of the local clans. Photographic reproductions of the texts are accompanied by romanised transliterations, suggestions for improved readings of unorthodox orthographies, English translations or paraphrases, and commentaries to each item. The general Introduction provides an ethnographic and historical outline of the region, and includes a study of Te’s system of irrigation management. The second part of the publication comprises a complete syllable index.
