The study of the language and civilization of the Mongols was for long a preserve of Russian scholars and of foreigners working in Russia. The publications of Schmidt, Kowalewski, Pozdneev and others, who built in the nineteenth century to some extent on the pioneer work of P. S. Pallas and his interpreter Jaehrig in the eighteenth, remain in full use even to-day. Only at the turn of the present century, with Ramstedt's studies of the Khalkha dialect, did isolated schools of Mongol scholarship begin to grow up elsewhere in Europe, notably in Helsinki and in Warsaw. In Germany and France, under such scholars as Professor Haenisch and the late Professor Pelliot, the study of Mongol remained a subordinate field of another discipline, sinology, while in England, apart from some interest at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Mongol remained an almost unknown subject until the arrival in Cambridge in 1948 of Mr. Denis Sinor. Nowadays studies continue in the U.S.S.R.—notably in Leningrad under Pučkovskii, and in Moscow under Sanjeev and Dylykov. But the post-war years have seen a general growth of interest in Mongol studies elsewhere as an independent discipline. Thus in Budapest, a group of young scholars, pupils of Professor Ligeti, have recently been publishing the results of field-work carried out in Mongolia itself. In Western Europe the material foundation for the extension of Mongol studies was undoubtedly laid by the late Professor Kaare Granbech, who assembled in Copenhagen a large and comprehensive collection of Mongol manuscripts. His work has been enthusiastically continued by Professor Heissig of Bonn, whose researches, based on the Copenhagen material and the collections in German libraries and in his own possession, have shown the great possibilities for literary and historical research in this field. Not the least of Heissig's services has been the founding and almost single-handed nursing of the series ‘Göttinger Asiatische Forschungen’ (now ‘Asiatische Forschungen’) which, though not restricted to Mongol studies, contains several text editions and studies in this field. In the United States of America, apart from the philological work being directed by Professor Poppe in Seattle, the enterprise of the Reverend Antoine Mostaert and Professor F. W. Cleaves, combined with the generosity of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, has resulted in the publication of three beautiful sets of volumes of texts in facsimile reproduction in the series ‘Scripta Mongolica’. The present article will deal with the latest volumes of the Bonn and Harvard series.
Profesorowi Witoldowi Wołodkiewiczowi (1929–2021) in memoriam
