PREVIOUS WORK ON THE HYMN-CYCLES

existence of many small fragments of manuscript, apparently containing verses from them, which he himself had not examined. It was clear that the way to a fuller understanding of the hymn-cycles lay through a study of these fragments, a task undertaken by W. B. Henning. In the course of several years of intermittent study Henning succeeded in piecing together a considerable number of fragments, and in acquiring thereby a clearer understanding of the general character of the texts. In 1943 he published a brief account of his findings in a note to Ts'ui Chi's translation of the Chinese Hymnscroll.¹ In this he showed that there were four distinct hymn-cycles in Middle Persian and Parthian, all of which appear to have been divided into cantos. In distinguishing between the two Parthian cycles he corrected the mistake over the order of the pages in M 855, publishing in evidence a partially preserved colophon to Huwidagmān from M 256, a fragment which, like M 855, contains the last lines of Huwidagmān on the recto page and the first lines of Angad Rōšnān on the verso.

The discovery of the existence of two distinct hymn-cycles in Parthian put the study of the handām texts on a new basis. Henning made yet another illuminating discovery in identifying vv. 262–338 of the Chinese Hymnscroll with the first canto of Huwidagmān. He published with a translation the fragments he had identified, using a normalized orthography. They were M 93 I, M 233, and M 625 b.

The Chinese title given to the verses from Huwidagmān is as follows (in Ts'ui Chi's translation):

"In praise of the World of Light. Containing seventy-eight Odes, each of which is in four lines. By Wei Mo the Mu-shê."²

Henning suggested tentatively that wei (未) might be a mistake for mo (末), in which case Muât-Mâu might represent Mār Ammō, the name of Mani's great apostle to the Parthians. If this is so, a comparatively precise date for the hymn-cycles can be established.³

Henning made two brief references to Mār Ammō's authorship of the hymn-cycles in subsequent articles entitled "Bráhman"⁴ and "Two Manichaean Magical Texts".⁵ In the former article he also published, to illustrate the meaning of a word, three verses

¹ BSOAS. xi, pp. 216–17.
² Op. cit., p. 199.
³ This matter is discussed again below; see p. 43.
⁴ Trans. Phil. Soc., 1944, p. 113.
⁵ BSOAS. xii, p. 50.