Describing Tibetan Writing

During the first theme of the project we have focused primarily on textual descriptions of Tibetan kingship. Faced with the problem of dating this material, much of it found in Dunhuang manuscripts, we developed methods for describing Tibetan writing and Tibetan documents with an eye to identifying features that can be used for dating them. In the process, we produced detailed descriptions of documents with known dates in order to make a baseline for comparison.

In 2012 we published a beta version of our methods on this website. These are now published in a monograph that is available both in print and in an open-access electronic version:
Brandon Dotson and Agnieszka Helman-Ważny, Codicology, Paleography, and Orthography of Early Tibetan Documents: Methods and a Case Study. (Vienna Studies in Tibetology and Buddhism 89.) Vienna: Association for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna.
It is available from the website of the Vienna Studies in Tibetology and Buddhism.