Dr. Mark Dickens (University of Alberta, Canada)

The Old Uyghur Nicene Creed from Turfan

At its height, the Church of the East covered more geographical territory than any Church before the Age of Exploration, when Catholicism spread to the Americas. It was especially successful in expanding eastward from the Persian Empire (and later the Muslim Caliphate) along the Silk Road to Central Asia and China, where it encountered people who spoke languages completely unrelated to Syriac (mostly Iranian or Turkic). This necessitated the translation of biblical and other Christian texts from Syriac into the mother tongues of those that the Church ministered to. One of the few places that the Church expanded into along the Silk Road, where we have indigenous textual evidence of that Christian presence (as opposed to just the testimony of outsiders) is Turfan in north-west China. German (or rather Prussian) explorers in the early twentieth century found an enormous number of manuscript remains, mostly Buddhist and Manichaean, in the Turfan oasis. Amongst the thousands of manuscript fragments found were about 1100 Christian fragments. Those fragments, in Syriac, Sogdian (a Middle Iranian language), Old Uyghur (a Turkic language), New Persian and Middle Persian, have all now been catalogued. Interestingly, we have two translations of the Nicene Creed, one into Sogdian and one into Old Uyghur. This presentation will examine the Old Uyghur translation of the Creed and discuss what it can tell us about the Christian community in Turfan.

Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Mark Dickens has taught at various institutions in Edmonton, Alberta, including the University of Alberta, St. Joseph’s College and The King’s University. He is currently an Adjunct Professor with the Department of History, Classics, and Religion at the University of Alberta. His scholarly work is concerned with connections between Syriac Christianity and Central Asia in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He has written over 30 published and forthcoming journal articles and chapters in edited volumes, as well as numerous entries on Central Asia in The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity. He has also co-authored with Dr. Erica C. D. Hunter, Syrische Handschriften, Teil 2: Texte der Berliner Turfansammlung / Syriac Texts from the Berlin Turfan Collection (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2014) and published an anthology of his articles entitled Echoes of a Forgotten Presence: Reconstructing the History of the Church of the East in Central Asia (Vienna: LIT, 2020).

Publications and Works

- “Syriac Gravestones in the Tashkent History Museum,” in Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia, edited by Dietmar Werner Winkler and Li Tang, Vienna: LIT (orientalia – patristica – oecumenica, 1), 2009, 13–49. - “Patriarch Timothy I and the Metropolitan of the Turks,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 20, no. 2 (2010): 117–39. - “The Importance of the Psalter at Turfan,” in From the Oxus River to the Chinese Shores: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in Central Asia and China, edited hy Li Tang and Dietmar Werner Winkler, Vienna: LIT, 2013 (orientalia – patristica – oecumenica, 5), 357–80. - “Syro-Uigurica II: Syriac Passages in U 338 from Turfan,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 16, no. 2 (2013): 301–24. - “Scribal Practices in the Turfan Christian Community,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 13 (2013): 3–28. - (with Peter Zieme) “Syro-Uigurica I: A Syriac Psalter in Uyghur Script from Turfan,” in Scripts Beyond Borders: A Survey of Allographic Traditions in the Euro-Mediterranean World, edited by Johannes den Heijer, Andreas B. Schmidt, and Tamara Pataridze, Leuven: Peeters, 2014 (Publications de l’Institut Orientaliste de Louvain, 62), 291–328. - “More Gravestones in Syriac script from Tashkent, Panjikent and Ashgabat,” in Winds of Jingjiao: Studies on Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia, edited by Li Tang and Dietmar Werner Winkler, Vienna: LIT, 2016 (orientalia – patristica – oecumenica, 9), 105–29. - “Syriac Inscriptions near Urgut, Uzbekistan,”Studia Iranica 46 (2017): 205–60. - (with Tjalling H. F. Halbertsma) “Inner Mongolian Syro-Turcica I: Contextualizing the Syro-Turkic Gravestones from Inner Mongolia,” Monumenta Serica 66 (2018): 279–302. - “Syriac Christianity in Central Asia,” in The Syriac World, edited by Daniel King, Abingdon: Routledge, 2019 (Routledge Worlds), 583–624. - “Yahbalaha the Turk: An Inner Asian Patriarch of the Eastern Christians,” in Echoes of a Forgotten Presence, edited by Mark Dickens, Münster: LIT, 2020 (orientalia – patristica – oecumenica, 15), 272–92. - “Tarsā: Persian and Central Asian Christians in Extant Literature,” in Artifact, Text, Context: Studies in Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia, edited by Li Tang and Dietmar Werner Winkler, Vienna: LIT, 2020 (orientalia – patristica – oecumenica, 17), 9–41. - (with Natalia Smelova) “A Rediscovered Syriac Amulet from Turfan in the Collection of the Hermitage Museum,” Written Monuments of the Orient 7, no. 2:14 (2021): 107–47. - “Where was the Christian Metropolitan Bishop of Nawākath Located?” Bulletin of the International Institute for Central Asian Studies 35 (2023): 50–65.