Manichaean Dictionary Project
Since 1999, the Trust has hosted Professor Sims-Williams' project to prepare a three volume Dictionary of Manichaean Texts, funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB). For this purpose, a series of scholars have worked in the basement.
The Manichaean religion was founded in the third century by Mani, and fuses many different elements; it once extended through Central Asia from the Mediterranean to southern China. Its sources are found in texts in Latin, Coptic, Greek, Syriac, Middle and New Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Bactrian, Tocharian, Turkish and Chinese. The aim of the Dictionary of Manichaean Texts is to provide a linguistic key to the complete corpus of materials. The Dictionary is presented in the form of a series of glossaries, each covering one language, and a consolidated index, enabling the location of any name, term or concept, in whatever language it occurs.
The following volumes have been published by Brepols, Turnhout:
Vol. I: Samuel Lieu (ed.), Texts from the Roman Empire (Texts in Syriac, Greek, Coptic and Latin), 1999.
Vol. II: Francois de Blois et al., Texts from Iraq and Iran (Texts in Syriac, Arabic, Persian and Zoroastrian Middle Persian), 2006.
Vol. III, I: Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst, Texts from Central Asia and China (Texts in Middle Persian and Parthian), 2004.
Dictionaries of Manichaean Texts in Chinese (Gunner Mikkelsen), Sogdian (D. Durkin-Meisterernst), Old Turkic (Larry Clarke) and Tocharian (Georges-Jean Pinault).