Pata Chazāna
Pata Chazāna ( Pashtun :پټه خزانه- “ The Hidden Treasure ”, other transcriptions: Peta Chazāna , Pata Khazana , Pata Xazāna ) is the title of a controversial manuscript in the Pashtun language. According to its discoverer, Abdul Hay Habibi, the text contains an anthology of Pashtun poetry written in the eighteenth century . The dates of origin of the compiled works named in the manuscript precede the earliest known Pashtun literature by several hundred years, so the discovery sparked controversy about the authenticity of the writing. The anthology and the older writings rumored in it could not yet be authenticated and are viewed in Iranian studies as a probable forgery.
discovery
The Afghan literary scholar Habibi, according to his own account, discovered the manuscript in 1944. Habibi stated that the document was a copy of an anthology written in 1886 in Kandahar by Shah Hussain Hotak . The document brings together works by previously unknown Pashtun poets that go back to the eighth century. Habibi published the manuscript as a facsimile in 1975 , but did not make the original that he supposedly discovered accessible.
reception
The oldest known document in the Pashtun language to date is dated to the sixteenth century, the works compiled in the Pata Chazāna extend the history of Pashtun literature by 800 years. The alleged discovery therefore caused controversy, the authenticity of the manuscript was controversial from the start. The first translation into a European language did not appear until 1987, it was published by the Italian Iranist Lucia Serena Loi with a detailed critical commentary. The Pakistani literary scholar Qalandar Mohmand wrote the most important critical examination of Pashtun-language scholarship in 1988.
Since Habibi's original manuscript is not accessible, the authenticity could only be checked on the basis of the orthography and style of the facsimile. In view of the many anachronisms and errors found in the facsimile, the authenticity of the manuscript is hardly considered possible in Iranian studies; Individuals, among them the Iranist Manfred Lorenz , do not want to completely exclude the authenticity of at least parts of the works compiled in the Pata Chazāna.
There is no consensus on the timing of manufacture. Loi classifies the manuscript as a forgery of the late nineteenth century. In contrast, the Iranist David Neil MacKenzie concludes from the anachronisms that the document was fabricated shortly before its alleged discovery in 1944. MacKenzie's central argument is the use of the two letters Dze and Nur, which are only used in the modern Pashtun script . These letters were only introduced in Afghanistan in 1936 with the reform of the Pashtun orthography and could not be found in any earlier manuscript at the same time.
literature
- Khushal Habibi (translator): Hidden Treasure (Pata Khazana) . University Press of America 1997, ISBN 0-7618-0265-7 (in English)
- Lucia Serena Loi: Il tesoro nascosto degli Afghani . Il Cavaliere azzurro, Bologna 1987, ISBN 88-85661-21-1 (in Italian)
- Qalandar Mohmand: Pata chazāna fi'l mīzān . Da tschap dschae, Peshawar 1988 (in Pashtun language)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Manfred Lorenz: The beginnings of the Paṣto literature and the Peta xazâna. in: A Green Leaf, Papers in honor of Professor Jes. P. Asmussen , Acta Iranica 28, Leiden 1988, p. 211 ff
- ↑ Lucia Serena Loi: Il tesoro nascosto degli Afghani . Il Cavaliere azzurro, Bologna 1987, p. 33
- ^ David Neil MacKenzie: The Development of the Pashto Script . In: B. Comrie (Ed.): Languages and Scripts of Central Asia . Croom Helm, London 1987, pp. 138 ff