The Stratigraphy of Manuscripts in the Light of Codices Recovered from the Dunhuang Library Cave

Abstract

With the development of codicology and the history of books in the second half of the 20th century, Western manuscript researchers proposed the notion of the “stratigraphy of the manuscript,” a methodology that utilizes the “strata” of archaeological sites as a metaphor for the historical layers of a given manuscript. This study takes several codices discovered in the Dunhuang Library Cave as examples and examines their internal strata using the methods of Western codicology in an attempt to offer additional insights into the collation and cataloging of Dunhuang manuscripts.

Keywords

Dunhuang manuscripts / codex / codicology / stratigraphy / history of books / cataloging

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