MANI'S ŠĀBUHRAGĀN

It is remarkable that of the many more or less fragmentary Manichaean writings in Iranian languages discovered in Central Asia at the beginning of this century,¹ one of the few texts directly attributable to Mani himself has still—seventy-five years after its first partial publication—not appeared in a full and satisfactory edition with translation. "Mani's Šābuhragān, in which he summarized his teachings in Persian for the enlightenment of Šābuhr I,"² is known from nine more or less fully preserved sheets (i.e., of at least two pages each) of one manuscript and some eight or nine smaller pieces.³ The larger fragments were first published in transcription in 1904, in F. W. K. Müller’s pioneering Handschriften-Reste in Estrangelo-Schrift aus Turfan, Chinesisch-Turkistan (Manuscript Remains in Estrangelo Script from Turfan, Chinese Turkestan), II,⁴ with an incomplete interlinear translation and partly out of order. The text alone was then republished in transliteration (in Hebrew letters) in C. Salemann’s Manichaeische Studien (Manichaean Studies), I.⁵ There the matter largely rested until 1930, when A. V. W. Jackson used the text extensively in his article "A sketch of the Manichaean doctrine concerning the future life."⁶ In an article published posthumously in 1946,⁷ A. Ghilain established—without seeing either photographs or the originals—that the two fragments of M 473 glassed together as a and b, and published by Müller as they so appeared, are to be fitted together in the reverse order, the lower piece b above the upper a. Most recently, Mary Boyce has included the text of the fragments M 473, 475, 477, 482, 472, and 470, so ordered correctly but with the omission of a number of incomplete passages, as text z in her Reader in Manichaean Middle Persian and Parthian.⁸

It was consideration of one of the passages omitted by Boyce (the "number of words after ahrāmēd ... too badly preserved for the sense to be clear," Reader, z 15, note) that led to the present publication. The text, M 472 I R, lines 1–6, as published by Müller and Salemann reads thus:

wpr wdcyd * * [ ]j'n
[ ] k' h'n rwšnyh [ ]j'nd
[ ]jd'n 'hr'myd (š) w n'(p)
'wd 'sm'n h'm(d) qwn'nd w
5 'sm'n 'y 'brdwm k(y) pd h'n
'y 'yrdwm hm'g šh(r)wny [ ]

It was immediately obvious to me that something was wrong: this could not

1. See Mary Boyce, A catalogue of the Iranian manuscripts in Manichean script in the German Turfan Collection, Berlin, 1960; also "The Manichaean literature in Middle Iranian," Handbuch der Orientalistik, I, 4, Iranistik, 2, Literatur, Lfg. 1, Leiden, 1968.
2. Boyce, "Man. lit.", 70.
3. Detailed description of all treatment to that date sub M 470 et seq., Boyce, Catalogue, 31.
4. Anhang zu den Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften vom Jahre 1904 (Appendix to the Proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences of the year 1904), II, Berlin, 1904, 1–117.
5. Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de St.-Pétersbourg, VIIIe série, VIII, 10, 1908.
6. JAOS, 50, 3, 1930, 177–98. He states (p. 183) that "although I have made a complete translation of the six Apocalyptic Fragments, with critical notes and explanations, for publication later, I can here give only a rendering of the first, and then an outline of the contents of the other five Fragments, with short renderings incidentally inserted."
7. "Un feuillet manichéen reconstitué" (A reconstructed Manichaean folio), Le Muséon, LIX, 535–45, with reference to a partial translation by F. C. Andreas.
8. Acta Iranica, 9, Troisième série, II, Teheran and Liège, 1975.