Friday, May 31, 2019

The Dunhuang Manuscripts

In 1900 a cache of religious manuscripts from a sealed cave was discovered at Dunhuang, China by a Daoist monk and began to be circulated and exhibited by collectors and museums.  In many respects the collection is similar to one gathered by the Nephite leaders in the Book Of Mormon and hidden away by one of their last prophets Mormon (in about 380 AD) near a place called by them Cumorah (Morm. 6:6).  A study of it may give us some clues to the still hidden Mormon collection.
Dunhuang Caves courtesy Wikipedia
According to Wikipedia
The Dunhuang manuscripts are a cache of important religious and secular documents discovered in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, in the early 20th century. Dating from late 4th to early 11th centuries, the manuscripts include works ranging from history and mathematics to folk songs and dance. There are also a large number of religious documents, most of which are Buddhist, but other religions including DaoismNestorian Christianity and Manichaeism are also represented. The majority of the manuscripts are in Chinese. Other languages represented are KhotaneseSanskritSogdianTangutTibetanOld Uyghur languageHebrew and Old Turkic. The manuscripts are a major resource for academic studies in a wide variety of fields including history, religious studies, linguistics, and manuscript studies.

The documents were discovered in a sealed cave by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu on June 25, 1900. From 1907 onwards he began to sell them to Western explorers, notably Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot. ...Those purchased by Western scholars are now kept in institutions all over the world, such as the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. All of the manuscript collections are being digitized by the International Dunhuang Project, and can be freely accessed online.
Manuscript courtesy Wikipecia


Also included under heading Mogao Caves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogao_Caves

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