Ingo Strauch (ed.)
Foreign Sailors on Socotra
The inscriptions and drawings from the
cave Hoq
(Vergleichende
Studien zu Antike und Orient, Bd. 3)
Dr. Ute Hempen Verlag Bremen: 2012. 17x24cm, ca.
592 pages, ISBN 978-3-934106-91-8, 98,00 ¤
Several years ago a group of Belgian
speleologists of the Socotra Karst Project made a spectacular
discovery. Deep inside a huge cave on the island Socotra they
came across a large number of inscriptions, drawings and
archaeological objects. As further investigation showed, they
were left by sailors who visited the island between the 1st c.
BC and the 6th c. AD. The majority of the texts is written in
the Indian Brāhmī script, but there are also inscriptions in
South-Arabian, Ethiopian, Greek, Palmyrene and Bactrian scripts
and languages. This corpus of nearly 250 texts and drawings thus
constitutes one of the main sources
for the investigation of Indian Ocean trade networks in the
first centuries of our era.
The present book is the first comprehensive
edition and study of this material.
It comprises contributions by an
international group of scholars who have been working on these
new discoveries for a couple of years (in alphabetical order):
Mikhail D. Bukharin (Moscow), Peter De Geest (Brussels), Hédi
Dridi (Neuchâtel), Maria Gorea (Paris), Julian Jansen Van
Rensburg (Brussels), Christian Julien Robin (Paris), Bharati
Shelat (Ahmedabad), Nicholas Sims-Williams (London, Oxford) and
Ingo Strauch (Berlin).
-- Please, use for further mails MY NEW EMAIL ADDRESS ingo.strauch@unil.ch. Prof. Dr. Ingo Strauch Sanskrit et Études Bouddhiques Université de Lausanne Anthropole 4118 CH-1015 Lausanne Phone ++41-(0)21-692-3005