Ksenia Borisovna Keping

Ksenija B. Keping on a ski tour north of Leningrad (winter 1965)

Ksenija B. Keping (seated) with Frances Wood in the British Library (March 2001)

Ksenija Borisovna Keping (born February 7, 1937 in Tianjin , died December 13, 2002 ) was a Soviet scientist who mainly dealt with the Tangut language .

biography

Keping's father, Boris Michailowitsch von Kepping (1896-1958), was a White Army officer in the Russian Civil War and emigrated to Harbin . Her mother, Olga Viktorovna Svyatina (1900-1992) was the daughter of a priest. Keping's parents married and moved to Tianjin, where Keping was born, grew up and attended Russian school from 1945 to 1954. In 1955 the family returned to the Soviet Union . Keping was accepted at the Central Asian University in Tashkent , but then moved to the Leningrad State University , where she studied Chinese Philology from 1955 to 1959 . After graduating, she took a position at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Leningrad , where she worked until her death in 2002.

Scientific activity

The Soviet Academy of Sciences had the largest collection of Tangut manuscripts in the world; this came from the expedition led by Pyotr K. Koslow to the abandoned fortress town of Kara-Choto . The execution of the most important tangutologists Aleksej Ivanov and Nikolaj Newski initially ended the processing of this material. At the end of the 1950s, research in this area was resumed under Evgeny Kytschanow .

In 1966, Keping began to study the Tangut language, its complex script and especially its grammar. In 1969, Keping completed a doctorate with a thesis on the Tangut translation of the Chinese "Art of War" by Sun Zi , which was published in 1979. In 1986, Keping completed her second dissertation on the morphology of Tangut.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Keping worked with numerous foreign colleagues, including George van Driem and Christopher Beckwith . From 1989 to 1990 she worked at the Central College for National Minorities in Beijing with the Chinese tangutologists Shi Jinbo, Bai Bin and Li Fanwen. During this time, she also recorded a number of Russian and Chinese lessons for Chinese radio and television. She visited the British Library in London several times to study the material that Aurel Stein had brought to England from Kara-Choto.

Keping became known for her theory that Tibetan Buddhism was the state religion of the Tangut Empire and that the Emperor and Empress performed tantric rituals.

In addition, Keping suggested dividing the Tangut language into two forms: a general or slang form that had been used for most of the extant texts, and for which around half of the six thousand different Tangut characters were used; and a ritualized language that has been passed down in some glossaries and religious odes. According to Keping, this ritual language is essentially an artificial language that was created by shamans before the adoption of Buddhism .

Works

• 1969. with VS Kolokolov, EI Kychanov and AP Terentev Katansky. Море письмен [《文 海》]. Moscow: Nauka.
• 1979. Сунь Цзы в тангутском переводе. Факсимиле ксилографа . Moscow: Nauka.
• 1983. Лес категорий [Forest of Categories]. Moscow: Nauka.
• 1985. Тангутский язык: Морфология . Moscow: Nauka.
• 1989. «西夏 語 的 結構». In Zhongguo Minzushi Yanjiu . Beijing: Zhongyang Minzu Xueyuan Chubanshe.
• 1991. with George van Driem. "The Tibetan transcriptions of Tangut (Hsi-hsia) ideograms". In Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 14.1: 117-128.
• 1994. "The conjugation of the Tangut verb". In Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 1994.2: 339-346.
• 1995. "The Official Name of the Tangut Empire as Reflected in the Native Tangut Texts". In Manuscripta Orientalia Vol. 1 No. 3 (December 1995): 22-32.
• 1996. " Tangut Ritual Language ". Contribution to the 29th International conference on Sino-Tibetan languages ​​and linguistics, Leiden, October 10-13, 1996.
• 1998. " The famous Liangzhou bilingual stele ". In T'oung Pao Vol. 84: 356-379.
• 2000. " The Verb in Tangut ". Contribution to the 9th seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Leiden, 2000.
• 2001. "'Mi-nia': Self-appellation and Self-portraiture in Khara Khoto Materials". In Manuscripta Orientalia Vol. 7 No. 4 (December 2001): 37-47.
• 2001. " Chinggis Khan's Name Encrypted in a Tangut Song ". In IDP News No. 19 (Winter 2001): 2-3.
• 2002. with Christopher I. Beckwith. "A preliminary glossary of Tangut from the Tibetan transcriptions". In Medieval Tibeto-Burman languages . Leiden, 2002.
• 2002. " The Autumn Wind by Han Wu-di in the Mi-nia Translation ". In Manuscripta Orientalia Vol. 8 No. 2 (June 2002): 36-51.
• 2003. " The black-headed and the red-faced in Tangut indigenous texts ". In Studia Orientalia 95: 275-298.
• 2003. Последние статьи и документы . St. Petersburg: Omega Publishers. ISBN 5-7373-0259-8
• 2003. " 'The General's Garden' in the Minia Translation ". In Последние статьи и документы . St. Petersburg: Omega Publishers, pp. 12-23.