Month: October 2025

Xixia 西夏, better known as the Tangut Empire (1038‒1227), was situated along the eastern segment of the Silk Road. Its dominant religion was Buddhism, and the religious elite produced a remarkably rich body of literature despite the empire’s relatively short existence. The Tangut language belongs to the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, however, […]

I. Prelude When the famous egyptologist Hermann Grapow characterized the Demotic script as being "the most evil of all evil Egyptian scripts" in 1939, he set the tone for the further study of Demotic and might have deterred many a student from any attempt at studying it properly. Indeed, there is some difficulty to be […]

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is the most widely transmitted (over eight hundred copies, including partial witnesses) and studied text of Italian literature. We do not possess either the autograph manuscript or the complete earliest phase of its transmission—indeed it would be more accurate to speak of “texts,” since the three canticles that make up the […]