Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer; Gabriel the Mongol; the Hunterian Library of the University of Glasgow; Tibetan; Oirat and Mongolian scripts; Tibetan and Oirat manuscripts; history of Tibetan and Mongolian studies; the Halle Orphanage
摘要
Gottlieb (Theophilus) Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738), the first Orientalist at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, came to Russia in 1726. By that time, he had already collected a certain amount of information on Tibetan, Oirat and Mongolian alphabets along with a few examples of texts in the first two languages and had published some of these materials. The other hero of the paper is a person known as Gabriel the Mongol, either an Oirat or a Mongol who served the Russians as an interpreter in Moscow.1 Most of the data Bayer had by the mid-1720s was obtained from Gabriel, apparently via Bayer’s contacts among the pietists2 who were active in Russia at that time. The aim of our paper is to analyze the contribution to Tibetan and Mongolian studies made by Bayer with use of Gabriel the Mongol’s manuscripts and present several documents from Bayer’s personal collection kept in the Hunterian Library of the University of Glasgow.
