 All right, so thank you very much for inviting me here and for hosting me. It's nice to be back in London. And sorry that we've had a global pandemic to interrupt these festivities. But in any case, it's nice that we're continuing on. Now, here, learning that we were going to be at the Royal Geographic Society, I thought that I needed to put some maps into my presentation. So I've started with a little bit of a geographical and historical sweep. I also wanted to spotlight a little bit of the parampara, the people who've been working on dice divination texts from turquological, tibetological, sinological perspectives, as well as archaeology and Islamic studies. So the talk that I'm going to be giving today will, sorry, it's jumping ahead a little bit, first look at the material culture of divination. And I've brought a pashaka dye here with me. This one's made of wood. A usual pashaka dye would be made of bone, sometimes made of stone, sometimes terracotta. So we'll be talking about the two aspects of dice divination, the two material aspects. That's the dye, and those are the books. And then getting into recent advances in old Tibetan studies, I wanted to focus on two of those more textual aspects, but sticking again with the material side, looking at compilation texts. The fact that a lot of these divination texts are found in compilations, in scrolls or in codices, where they sit side by side with a lot of other different texts, and what their textual neighbors might have to say about them. And then also to the format, I mentioned scrolls, I mentioned codices. So I will briefly introduce what the significance is when you have such texts in a scroll versus in a codex. And then I will get on to the namesake of the workshop, some of these recent advances. And actually, I'll most likely pitch those in the sense of narrowing questions, recent advances that give us better questions but not necessarily answers to those better questions just yet. All right, so you're in a beautiful drawing room and we're talking about dice divination. How did this happen? The genealogy that I want to show you would take us back about 100 years or 150 years, looking at 19th century, late 19th century, and early 20th century spiritualism and exoticism when people withhold seances and try to contact maybe famous dead poets or maybe they are their ancestors. And it's in this time that you have a surge of interest in dice divination. First, the awareness that such a thing exists. And then an interest in the material object of dice divination, what were at the time and maybe for some of us still, were exotic objects. Exotic books like the Yerkebetik, the Book of Omens that you see here, an old Turkish dice divination text written in runic script. And you see from the Tachila Museum a few Pashaka dice here. So these had been turning up in archeological reports from the early 20th century. And then in the lower left hand corner, you can see one of the earliest translations of a dice divination text into a Western language. This was initially an Arabic text and translated into Ottoman Turkish and then into French by Deku de Manche in 1899. So that his French readers would have access to this technology and could tell their fortunes via dice. So we've got exotic dice, exotic books, exotic languages, exotic wisdom and a background with a cocktail of theosophy and Orientalism. So I wanted to introduce some of the people who probably would be comfortable in this drawing room who are at the origins of this tradition of research into dice divination. Here we have Albrecht Weber who wrote in 1859 on the Pashaka Kevali and Frederick William Thomas who worked across London at the British Library for some time and was also at Oxford. So I'm going to go through this genealogy briefly. First looking at Indology, then its central Eurasian studies including here Tibetan, Turkish and Sogdian studies. A glance at Islamic studies. Do we have any people working in Islamic studies in the room? Shame. All right, and then Sinology and then Archaeology before we move on to those compilation texts, codices and recent advances. So in terms of, this one's jumpy, in terms of Indology, I mentioned Weber. You just saw his picture. He had worked on this text called the Pashaka Kevali. The Pashaka is the die that I've just passed around. The Pashaka Kevali is the book that goes together with that die that shows you how you can use this die or three different dice to throw them and in that way create a combination, look that combination up in the manuscript and in that way gets your fortune told. So this is a canonical text in the sense that there are many different versions of the Pashaka Kevali. They were edited, or quite a few of them were edited by Schütte in his 1900 thesis. And these stand apart from the earliest manuscript evidence of Pashaka dice divination. So that comes in Rudolf Cornelis' translation of the Bauer manuscript, 1897. The Bauer manuscript is find a Birchbark Sanskrit manuscript taken out of a stupa in Kuntura in Kucha that essentially was the starting gun or one of the early starting guns on the story of European adventurers and scholars like Rolf Stein, like Paul Peleo, like Albert von Lekoch going around the Silk Road and supplying the museums and the archives of Berlin and Paris and London for decades. So this caused quite a sensation and this is one of the compilation texts that I will introduce. For now I can say that this is a picture of one leaf of it and that it contains two dice divination texts which are similar to the Pashaka Kevali but which are not themselves Pashaka Kevalis. Now those are books. It wasn't until 1907, Heinrich Lüter's writing in German, a short but very important work where he revealed that it was a particular kind of die the Pashaka die that was used in these rituals and he gives a history of the Pashaka die along with histories of other types of Indian dice made from nuts. For example, you have those made from the Vibhitika nut but this Pashaka die being a long die with four sides four, three and two, one from which the Vedic world ages take their name according to many versions of the myth. Now you have a big jump in time. It's almost like the book is closed on dice divination and Pashaka dice until the late 20th century where there's a resurgent interest in the ludic aspect in Lila in Indian religions, in play and in these dice games that Shiva and Parvati play or in these dice games that might stand at the origin of these vratyas, these fraternities. So Harry Falk, David White, Handelman and Shulman are writing about these issues towards the end of the 20th century but not so much working on the Pashaka Kevali, Kwa Pashaka Kevali. So to the Bower manuscript, you have two texts there. In one of them there's in the second of these you have an opening invocation to Vishnu to the Maruts, to the Seers and it opens up. It says, oh thou pure, pure, stainless devi, oh devi, that which is true, that which is well, all that you do, thou show to us, though the human eye may fail, the divine eye will prevail, though the human ear may fail, the divine ear will prevail, though the human smell may fail, the divine smell will prevail, though the human tongue may fail, the divine tongue will prevail, oh thou garlanded one, thou garlanded one sahah. Right, so here you see this role of the goddess, the garlanded one. This is actually a chant that one would do in order to win at dice. So you have that aspect of dice gaming and cheating. They're kind of written into the text from the beginning. Now to give you a sense of what your fortune might be, now on that die, if you were to roll it three times to get a one, a four and a four and were you using this particular text, you would look it up and then you'd read this or somebody would look it up for you and they'd read this out to you. When one comes first and then twice four, then thou wilt attain progress in all thy businesses and wealth. Thy family Devata, Maheshvara, the great Deva will be favorable to thee. Give praises to him and worship and keep his vigils. Very great will be thy gain, there is no doubt about it. And this shall be a token to thee. There is an ulcer on thy buttocks. Also in thy sleep thou talkest much. So you see here you have this pantheon of gods who were invoked. You had Vishnu, you had the Rishis, the Maruts. In some of these responses it just talks about your Devata, your personal God who's going to be protecting you, favorable toward you. So it's about being in the good graces of your own personal Devata. So in approaching these, one of the easiest things to do and one thing that's been sort of the low hanging fruit for those who read these texts and get into comparing one with another is to say, okay, if I roll a, what was that, a 144? Yeah, if I roll a 144 in this text, is it the same as a 144 in that text and is that the same as a 144 in the other? So here, going back to Albrecht Weber's work, you have a tabulation of the different responses and you see how they proceed. The Pashaka Kevali proceeds very orderly. 111 to 112 to 113. Reading across as you would in English, left to right, top to bottom. Last one is 444 in the lower right hand corner. So you can navigate the text pretty well. It's orderly, it's going in ascending order. If it's not got an underline on it, then that's a good response. If there are two lines under it, that's a bad one. And if there's one, then it's mixed. So you can see the balance of fortune is generally in your favor. You're going to get a good response about two thirds of the time. This table itself was drawn up by Franke, H. Franke in the second of his two articles on dice divination texts from Turfan. But he's using Weber's Pashaka Kevali. So the image of the text that I showed you on the second slide, the Irkabitik, the Book of Omens in Runic Turkish, has been studied several times. First by Thomson, who you see here, Wilhelm Thomson, Bully Bang, Jared Klosson, Talatekin, Volker Ebbatsky. And the issues that they've brought up are several. One is Manichaean influence. Was this a Manichaean text? Was it written by a Manichaean author? And there is a colophon there that some have read as indicating a Manichaean influence. Others, looking again at the number of oracular responses, which is 64 in the Pashaka Kevali and in the Irkabitik and in every divination text of this sort, there's always 64 responses. They say, ah, well, the Yijing has 64 responses and the Turks were in the Chinese cultural orbit. So this is some sort of Turkish Yijing. You've got Manichaean influence. You've got Chinese influence. Maybe also Nestorian Christian influence, the Sorte Sanctorum. You have fragments of the Sorte Sanctorum found in Dunhuang as well. So that's another question about how do these influences come to play on the Turkish book of omens, the Irkabitik? So what do these look like? Now, here you see one page of this. It's a codex. We'll get to its format in a moment. This is the 18th entry in the text for the combination two, four, one, read from right to left. What is the inside of the tent frame like? What is the smoke hole like? What is its window like? It can be seen through. How is its roof? It is good. How are its ropes? They are all there, it says. No, thus the omen is very good. So you notice here how the entry is very, very different from what you find in the Bauer manuscript. The Bauer manuscript has mentions of virgins and goddesses. It's very Indic. This one has camels. It has bake Turkish nobles. It has tents, falcons. So it's very much an adaptation to Turkish cultural norms. And it ends there with that final evaluation. This is good. Right, so getting into Tibetan studies and the history of Tibetan studies looking at these sorts of texts. I mentioned Franke, 1924 and 1928. He was looking at Turfan texts from the Berlin Turfan collection. Thomas then turns his eyes to Dunhuang manuscripts in a chapter in his posthumous book, Ancient Folk Literature from Northeastern Tibet. Macdonald gets in on the action writing about divination in her Magnum Opus in 1971. Stein gives a very interesting study of divination about its poetry. The oracular poetry of Tibetan divination and how the poems, as he calls them, stand really at the origins of Tibetan poetry and song. And there's an intertextuality that he finds between one oracular response and another throughout a divination text. More recently, the two people who've been working on these texts are I, Nishita, and myself. Nishita's been surveying them and establishing preliminary typologies of these texts in terms of their structures and their semantics. I've also been studying semantics, ritual assumptions, and material culture. So if you were to be using one of these Tibetan texts, the oldest one, or sorry, the newest one, the most recent, it's a 10th century codex. And you were to roll a one, three, three with that die. You would get the following. Oh, since you made a good offering on the site, you killed your hated enemy without even worshiping the gods. You killed the deer on the wastes without even exchanging with the man goddesses. Offered to the gods of the land and hunt the deer of the north. Gather your beloved relatives and strike your enemy's heart with a dagger. This divination is excellent for whatsoever you've cast it. Now about intertextuality, that same response is found in a ninth century scroll. And there it's for the combination four, two, four, instead of one, three, three. So there's a lot of move-ons. There's a lot of movement of these across formats and also across numbers. That number is not a reliable anchor for the content that follows from one text to the next. There's no single text that you can point to and say this one was copied from that one reliably. Those ones where there are overlaps, it seems more to be a transmission of tradition rather than a transmission of text. Barring just one exception. So moving into signology. Here we have the Mosi Sula Wobu, the divination of Maheshvara. We saw Maheshvara as the family deity and that entry from the Bower manuscript and Shiva along with Vishnu being invoked in the preliminary materials before the divination text in the Bower manuscript. This text itself is named after Maheshvara. So Maheshvara is a great shape-shifting God moving across the boundaries of one religious tradition and another and also moving across geographical boundaries into esoteric Buddhism and 10th century Dunhuang and its Chinese devotees here in this text. So this has been first brought to scholarly attention by Mark Kalinowski in 1994, then again in 2003. And then you have studies by Wang Ai-he by Lutoting Wang Jingbo and Michelle Strickman as well. Strickman's being sort of a forerunner to what I've been trying to do with getting this larger global geographical picture on this tradition and its transmission. He had a very similar project of trying to take stock of the transmission of divination. And I should mention I've got a book coming out with Connie Cook and Zhao Lu on this text. So were you to roll a 222? That is the second entry in this text and you can see it right there, 222 at the top of the page. It would say this is named the God Vinayaka set. If a person has issues to resolve the God will protect him or her. Whatever she needs will soon be obtained. Clothing and food will come of their own accord and whatever she seeks will be fulfilled. Subsequently camels, horses and various domestic animals will not die or be injured. Greatly auspicious. So like the book of omens which ends each response with no thus it is good. Clear evaluation, this one too ends with Da Ji, greatly auspicious or if it's not Xiong, you know, inauspicious. So in terms of that perspective too that you have with signology some of the people who studied this made different connections. Kalinovsky looked at it in the context of numerical trigram traditions, right? Where you have numerical trigrams that you might find in the Ling Qi Jing, in the Jing Jue, in the Guan Gong Ming or in any of the other these Chinese divination traditions where you're not creating a traditional hexagram or trigram of single or broken lines but rather a set of numbers like four, three, two or six, one, six. So he was looking at it in that context. Others like Wang Ai He assumed that it had to go back to the Yi Jing. But again, because of the number 64 there are 64 responses in this text. And I look at it along with my co-authors in the context of this larger tradition of Pashaka dice divination. All right, so here we have Gustav Flügel. All of these figures, all of these black and white figures we have are coming from Germany it seems. So Gustav Flügel in 1861 revealed the existence again to the Western scholarly world of Falnama and Kitab al-Fal. So Persian and Arabic texts on luck, on fortune that used dice. And summarized a few of these alongside many other traditions of divination that he found in Arabic texts. 1899, you have this translation by Dekour Dimanche. Beth Donaldson in her book, The Wild Rue of Persia in 1938 describes witnessing divination seances using dice. And then you have other attestations of dice of this type or similar types, Ramalapasa related but different kind of dye being used for divination in Persia and in India. Then you have people like Emily Savage Smith writing about the material culture of these dice. The dye that you see here with its four sides of one, two, three and four and all of those small ornamental circles around it is kept in the Kalili collection here in London. There are two such dice in the Kalili collection here. The dye that I've passed around is about seven centimeters long. That dies closer to 11 centimeters long. So it's a bit larger. And the other one in the Kalili collection is more ornamental. Inside one of those roundels, one of those pips, you have a scorpion and in another roundel you have a bird. So there's a little bit more ornamentation on those in any case, Savage Smith and others who have written on these dice probably found near Fustat in Egypt have dated them seventh to 10th centuries roughly. All right, so what would this look like? In the Bodleian shelfmark OR 133, we have another very interesting compilation text. And the most famous book in this compilation is the Kitab al-Bulhan which is sometimes called the Book of Wonders. Besides this Book of Wonders with beautiful illustrations, you have as well these 64 pages with 64 divination omens. And they're using letters instead of numbers. So instead of circular pips as in the Tibetan or as in the runic Turkish or instead of numbers as you have in the Sanskrit and the Chinese, the Islamic manuscripts all use letters. And they use the first four letters of the abjad usually. But in this case, they're playing with letters. So you have the letters Ja, A, Fa and Ra from the name Jaffer, for Jaffer al-Sadik who supposedly invented this divination tradition in the eighth century. That's the origin story that's told about divination in this tradition. Right, so here you would have, this is from the Kuwaiti Monk, note that the image does not match the text. It's from a different text that this translation has taken and from a different entry. But for this entry, you would have something like this. Be content, you for whom everything succeeds. You can expect many good things, you will be delivered from sorrow because you will obtain goods and fortune. You won't need to submit to any challenge and you will receive a large profit from trade. All your desires will be satisfied if it pleases God. So you see those Islamic sensibilities. Everything, as when you speak of the future, is ending with Anshallah. So moving into the last bit of this genealogy and the archeology of Pashaka Dice. Here in London, there's a few Pashaka Dice that are on exhibit in the British Museum and there are some kept down underneath the British Museum that I've had the pleasure of seeing with the help of Michael Willis. I'll show you images of those in a moment. But in terms of the chronology of archeological reports, including Pashaka's brief and partial survey, you have Oral Stein, ancient Kotaan in Serendia, Maki excavations at Mohenjo-Daro. So John Marshall, Atashila, Albaam in Kairabad-Tepe, so in Central Asia, and then Seminov and Aripjadunov more recently, also in Central Asia. So Bukhara and their abouts. And then Daniel Michon writing about Marshall's reports and sifting through that report to, among other things, argue for the use of these dice as ritual objects and not as play things, which was how Marshall had classified them in his initial report. So here you see the two dice that were recovered by Oral Stein, one from Nia and one from Kotaan. You can just see one side of each of these here. You notice that one is very small. It's only four centimeters, whereas the other is roughly the same dimensions of the die that I passed around, about seven centimeters. End up being about, these are two distinct types of dice when we get into the typologies of the material culture of these dice. And you see on the map there where Nia is in respect to Mazartag and then Dunhuang being off the screen to your right. So the prehistory of these, where we have dice of this shape, Pashaka dice, but not of the same type, goes back to Mohenjo-Daro and probably to the earliest layers of Mohenjo-Daro. So third millennium before the common era. And you see the difference here in these images of these four different dice, the difference being that while our die has one, two, three and four, these dice have one, two, three and then their fourth side is something else. It's two long black lines. So the exact meaning for this is a matter of speculation, but in any case, I mentioned these as the deep prehistory, the deep Indic prehistory of these objects. All of the other dice date to roughly first century through 10th century of the common era, maybe some a little bit earlier. All right, so the geographical spread here, you see we're near Termeze, the borders of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, south of Samarkand, where Albam documented two dice in his 1960 archeological report. One of these was broken in half. Going further south into Tashila, Tashila, this extremely important city on the banks of the Indus River. Very important for the transmission of Buddhism out of the heartland of India up through into Gandharan civilization and then into Chanzoksanya. Now we have 16 dice that were found there and the dice are found in, according to Daniel Mishon, richly charged objects in proximity to the goddess Harithi, for example, and the god Panchika, her husband. Some are found near Stupa's and there's also a group of three together, again suggesting divination because while you can cast one die three times, in divination, you can also cast all three dice at once. So these are two images of dice found there. You see the differences also in their ornamentation, their pips, some with simple concentric circles, the other one in the middle with three small circles inside of the roundel. And then moving into Central Asia to these more recent archeological reports by Seminov and by Aripchadinov, we have these interestingly kind of tracking the movements of Buddhism and the farthest northern and western expanses of early Buddhism. And you see the variety of dice here. Most interesting is in the top left. It's the only die of its kind. I mentioned the scorpion and the bird inside the roundel in one of the Kalili dice, but this one has not pips but birds. One bird, two birds, three birds, four birds, right? And different types. It's a peacock for one, and it's two cocks for two. For three it looks like doves and for four also it looks like doves. That one in particular. I believe that's from near Bukhara, but I can get you the details later. So to those two objects kept in the British Museum, this one from Khyber, Pakhtunkhwa, it's snub-nosed so that to say only four centimeters, you can see the measuring tape right next to it when it was photographed made out of terracotta. Date range is not really certain on this, but as I say, it's a very wide date range from around the 1st century to the 10th century of the common era. And then you have this one made of stone from Stuart Gratton's collection. This from further south, Lal-Tibi, in the Punjab in contemporary Pakistan. Now going further to the west, I mentioned these dice probably from Fustat, though their provenance is not certain. And here you can see those roundels that I mentioned in the perpendicular die. And you see the other Kalili die to its right above them is a die that's been on exhibition in the Louvre in the Egyptology section. So Savage Smith has written about this, Irving Finkel at the British Museum has written about this. And then in terms of people who study the history of their games and play, Stuart Cullen, who was writing about the origins of playing cards and dice and all sorts of different games wrote about these particular types of dice in 1896 as well. All right, so with that survey, that genealogy, I wanted to go into a bigger picture of this tradition. One point to make about dice is that dice are usually balanced. Does anybody play with dice? Anybody, a gamer or a gambler? You've got a die? What kind of die do you have? Just ordinary. Yeah, let's see one. The kind that you use. You've got a six-sided die? Yeah, just use the kind of dice that you use when you're playing games. All right. So look at your six. What's on the other side of it? A one. Your five opposite is a two. Opposite your three, four. So it's always adding up to seven. The seven days of the week, the seven heavenly bodies, there's a cosmological reason for that. And even when you look at other sorts of dice, if you get into funny games and you have to buy a 12-sided die or a 10-sided die or a 20-sided die, then usually they still do observe this pattern of balanced opposing faces. Not so in these dice. The die that I've given you does not have balanced opposing phases and that's because most of the dice, as far as I've been able to tell in any case, also follow this pattern. The pips wind around the die in descending or ascending order, four, three, two, one. You don't have one opposite four and three opposite two. The opposing sides don't add up to five. In other words, it is an unbalanced die. So the reasons for that balance, I just mentioned them to you, they're cosmological around the number seven. The reasons for this imbalance, I believe are also cosmological and they just go back to what I mentioned about the Vedic world ages, taking their names from the roles of dice, the Krta, Treta, Dvapara and Kali ages, right? In descending order until the destruction of the world and its recreation and the repetition of this pattern again. So that encoding of cosmology into the object itself along with its very old Indic prehistory going back to perhaps the third millennium BCE, Mohenjo Daro, really argues against seeing a Chinese origin of this tradition from the Yijing. Also argues against seeing a Hellenic origin of this from the Sortes traditions that might use astragaloi or sheep's knuckles as the object of divination. So we have dice in Tashila, Gandhara or Gandhara, Khyber, Thermes, Sogdhiana, Samarkand, Kashgarakucha, Kothan, but not Dunhuang. We don't have them there. In any case, this movement of dice across time and across space tracks fairly nicely the spread of Buddhism as well. And these dice are found in the literal shadows of stupas across Central Asia and across the Silk Roads. So the absence of dice in Dunhuang is a mystery and it's something that I like to think is an accident of documentation. I believe they ought to be there. Maybe they are there and I'm just not aware of it or people have come across them and not known what to do with them but it is a missing piece to this puzzle. Okay, so as I mentioned at the outline, I'm going to shift and talk now about compilations and about codices. In giving you the history, I showed you black and white pictures of deceased scholars. I also showed you a few images of the manuscripts and some excerpts of their contents just to give you a sense of the flavor of these texts but for the most part, as fascinating as their contents are I'm going to sidestep those in the presentation. In the Q&A, feel free to ask me more about the contents. I'll even let you test out the method if you want me to tell your fortune. So I'm going to go back in time a little bit. I've been visiting the British Library the past couple of days and I'll go there again tomorrow. My first visit there was in the early 2000s and it was to see this scroll here. It's a very long one, 8.5 meters long and if you've not been rolling scrolls, it's quite a lot to deal with having to roll and unroll 8.5 meters of one when you're first encountering Dunhuang manuscripts. But in any case, this posed a problem, not just one of logistics and rolling and unrolling but the fact that there's two texts on this scroll. I was reading it for the legal text, mostly. That's the second half of this, or that's one half of the scroll. The second half of the scroll is this legal text and the first half is a dice divination text. So it's split evenly between law and dice divination and the question is why? If these are two separate texts entirely, why are they written in the same hands? Okay, maybe the same scribe wrote two different texts. Right, but then why not cut the thing and take the legal text one way and take the divination text the other? What does the proximity of your textual neighbors say about you? What does divination say about law? What does law say about divination? Did the one person use both? Okay, that's fine. Did the one person use divination to prosecute law? That's quite another thing. So these were the sorts of questions that I was forced to confront by this artifact and by these two texts living together in the same scroll. So I wanted to look at this from the perspective of compilation texts when you do have these textual neighbors and the question is what these neighbors say about you. So the legal text is called replies to queries from the shotsik of the Tiger year kashu. For those of you who don't know Tibetan, shou means dice. That's one of the things that shou means. And when Hugh Richardson came across this, he assumed that shou couldn't mean dice, that it had to mean something else, that it must be tax, right? Even though we don't really have attestations from this period or anywhere near this period of shou, meaning tax, shoubei can be fraud, but then you have shoubei, which is a compound and it's different from just shou or cholo, which is also dice. So it's a question and answer form where you have different apparatchiks from the frontiers coming up with questions, sending them to the judges of the court's retinue, those judges issuing answers and then sending it back to them. So you can think of it as an FAQ of its time where this was circulated and it ends up being part of a responsive legal code where it's not just here are the statutes to follow, but here are the statutes to follow and here's this other document that tells you how people have negotiated these specific situations that might be like yours when you come upon a similar problem. And this was not the only text of its kind. It addresses discrepancies with a similar casho issued in a horse year as opposed to this tiger year. So thinking with other compilations about the relationship between dice divination and law in our Tibetan scroll IOL-TIV-J740, we can look to the Moshisholobu, the divination of Maheshvara, this dice divination text from Dunhuang, the only Chinese text of its sort attested so far. So it is in a codex, a large codex, that includes eight texts and it's the second of these eight texts and it's split half and half. Four divination texts, four medical texts. Now this codex is also pretty well worn. It has a tear in it as well. It's greasy. It looks like it's been used probably for the purpose that it was intended to perform divination and to be at hand when doing these particular medical processes. But as you can see or not, I think the text is a bit small on this slide, there's a blurring of lines and that blurring is very helpful, it's very intentional between medicine and divination, between prognosis and diagnosis as it were. And especially in that eighth text which is called Tracing Signs of Disease to the Origin by Divination from the sounds and colors corresponding to the five viscera. So you see divination being used in the service of diagnosis and medicine here. So we have the Moshe Sholobu, the divination of Maheshvara as the second text, nested with these other divination texts and then moving on through the codex, you have these treatises on the five viscera, on pulses and so on. So looking at further compilation texts, we have a text that's been recently written about by Nicholas Sims-Williams and I'm relying on him, he's kindly shared some of his work on this with me, it's preliminary and I'm sure he'll be publishing this soon in any case, I don't think I'm revealing anything here that's not already more or less public. So there's this Mataki and Sogdian codex fragment, it's a different kind of codex than what we have in the case of the method of Maheshvara, the divination of Maheshvara, that's a butterfly bound codex. So in a butterfly bound codex, you take bifolios, you fold them and you lay them on top of one another so you'd have one like that and then another like that and you glue them or paste them, sometimes wrap a binding around the spine. As you would do when making a booklet for say a small conference with the Sogdian codex, you're putting these bifolios nesting them around each other, the way that you might with a booklet putting a staple in the middle these days. So here, this fragment has, it's kept in Turfan in the Berlin collection. It has 12 irracular responses and in terms of its neighbors, it has hymns in Middle Persian and Parthian and Sogdian and Old Turkish nearby, also a famous Sogdian confessional text and then hemorological, that's calendrical divination and medical hemorological text telling you how you should be faring on each day of the month depending on these particular prescriptions. And then another compilation. This is a counterpoint to all of these other compilations. You have the Irkbitik. Before the Irkbitik, you have two Chinese fragments, the Wu Hui Fa Shi Zan and then this yuleji on the boat for the children of the Buddha. Now, Rai Batsky has argued, following a few others, that these aren't related at all to the Book of Omens, to the Irkbitik. In fact, they're there at the beginning and they're there at the end to protect it from weather, to protect it from damage. They're essentially padding. So they're not text, they're just paper, they're filler. So that's to argue that they're completely unrelated to one another. So you have these two poles of argument in terms of intertextuality and proximity for these texts. You could have something where they're ostensibly related as you find with those eight texts in the codex in which the divination of Maheshvara is found where divination is used for diagnosis in a medical method. But then you have this weak argument where these texts need not be related to one another at all. They might just be padding, they might just be protection. So thinking with these about archeological context and physical proximity, what do we say about these that are found together? Does their proximity necessitate a relationship at all? Now that latter weak case is similar to the problem that one finds with recto and verso where you have the Tibetan written on the verso and there's some Chinese on the recto. And maybe somebody has taken a few different Chinese scrolls and pasted them together to make a longer scroll in order to write the Tibetan text onto that scroll. What's the relationship between them? It's just material, right? There's no necessary relationship between the Vajracetika that you find on the Chinese side and the legal texts that you find on the Tibetan side to try to make that connection and to say, ah, the one informs the other is really just so much fantasy, right? So could one be doing the same thing in trying to relate compilation texts and trying to relate those texts in a compilation to one another? Or is it purposive that they are next to one another? This is a variant of the problem that we find in tombs, tombs of Chinese officials who have legal documents alongside divination texts in their tombs together. And different people have said, ah, this means that judges, magistrates use divination in order to decide legal cases. And this is the strong argument that one can make here. This is one that's been put forward by Tsuguita Takayuchi and by Aini Shida. I made a variation of that argument which inspired them. And I've since pulled back a little bit from it. I believe that law and divination were probably part of the shared repertoire of the user or users of this text, but I'm less sure that these legal cases were decided with recourse to dice divination. So that's compilation, now to format into the codex format. We have, when looking at divination texts, 16 Tibetan scrolls and fragments from Dunhuang, all of these date to the 9th century. The only later dice divination texts from Dunhuang 10th century is a codex. We also have the Moshi Shulawobu, that's a codex, and the Irkvitik as a codex as well. There's the three of them side by side. Going to Turfan, we have five Tibetan scroll fragments from the 9th century. We know that these are not codex fragments because you don't have Tibetan on the Verso. And then we have three Sogdian fragments from the 9th or possibly the 10th century. In Mazatag, two Tibetan scroll fragments from the 9th century, and then there's the Bower manuscript from Kucha going further west along the Silk Road. So here we have these three dice divination codices from Dunhuang, the Irkvitik, the divination of Maheshvara, and the Tibetan codex. So these are different in format. Both the Irkvitik and the Moshi Shulawobu, S5614, are butterfly bound. And you can see a nicer illustration of what butterfly bound means in the image below. You see that the divination of Maheshvara is very large. It's 30 centimeters high. So this is a good-sized booklet, whereas the Irkvitik is pocket-sized, 13.6 by 8 centimeters. And the Tibetan codex is also comparatively small. The Tibetan codex differs in that, while the Moshi Shulawobu and the Irkvitik would both be read similarly, opening it as one would a codex, but reading it as one would a Japanese book, the Tibetan codex is head bound. So you bind it at its head and you flip it vertically. So that's the orientation, the difference in orientation of these texts. So now to some of these recent advances. One of the joys, I guess, of working in old Tibetan documents is comparing them with the classical Tibetan texts and finding just how much things have changed or sometimes just how much has been invented in terms of tradition and origin when it comes to these later Tibetan traditions and their ignorance of what came before. So from that perspective, we have a text called the Motsi. It's in the Tenjur, this collection of commentaries on the word of the Buddha, part of the Tibetan canon, the Kanjur and the Tenjur. And this is attributed to Shantideva, great Indian Buddhist philosopher of the 7th to mid 8th century. The colophon states that it was translated by Gotam Shri and Tarpalo Tsawanima Genshin. So these are 13th to 14th century figures. And it has, like all Pashaka divination texts, 64 omens. So a version of this was translated by Roger Housden and Stephen Hodge. And it comes with these dice, little Pashaka dice that you can pass around and have a look at. The difference that you see in these Pashaka dice compared to the earlier die that I passed around and those that have been attested by various archaeologists from India to Central Asia is that this one is inscribed with letters. It's inscribed with the letters ah, wá, ya, and da. So this means that you would have a combination like ah, ah, or ah, wá, ah, as opposed to one, one, one, or one, two, one. It also gives you instructions for how to inscribe these dice, how one needs to take it from the root of a particular tree and make it according to the specifications given in the text. So this, um, this is marked by its strong difference from the earlier tradition. There's no very clear relationship between the textual contents of the old Tibetan dice divination texts and those of this canonical Tibetan Buddhist dice divination texts, but then also the material culture itself using letters instead of pips. So if one were to organize dice divination, ah, dice and divination texts in the most obvious way and to look at those that use numbers, those that use pips, and those that use letters, you get three groups. One is the earliest dice divination text, the Bauer manuscripts, sixth century at the latest. And then the next is the divination of Maheshvara, this Chinese Dunhuang dice divination text from the 10th century. Those ones both use numbers. Then those that only use pips, so they're representing on the page exactly what they get from the dice throw, one-to-one representation, old Tibetan texts and the old Turkish Irkevitik, 9th century and 10th century. Then there's those that use letters. So you have here our Tibetan Buddhist texts, the Mozi, 13th or 14th century. But you have strange bedfellows here. The Saugdian codex that I mentioned also uses letters. And all of the Islamic texts use letters, all of the Kitab al-Fal and Falnima that you have in Persian, in Arabic, in Turkish, use letters as opposed to numbers, as opposed to pips. So you see the letters that are used here, the abjad. But you see also, and this was pointed out by Strikman in 2005, that awaya and da correspond to the first four letters of the Greek alphabet. So this creates a puzzle. Where is it that this 14th century Tibetan tradition came from? It doesn't seem to have come from the earlier Tibetan tradition. So was this a retransmission? And this retransmission, where did it come from? Did it come from the Islamic world in the 13th or 14th century? What would be the intermediaries bringing this into Tibet? So these are partly linguistic problems in terms of what language was the intermediary for the Saugdian. And this is something that Nicholas Sims Williams is addressing in his work. But in terms of that later tradition and the break between the Dunhuang manuscripts and the Dunhuang tradition and this later tradition, it does seem to point to stronger links outside of the Tibetan world. So writ large also, it's an interesting question to why pips instead of numbers and why letters? Where did that innovation come from? So we have a transmission. The picture of transmission is out of the Indic world over the Silk Road into the Islamic world by the 8th century at the latest. So the use of so-called letter magic of abjad of jafar in the Islamic world, maybe this recommends itself for transforming pips into letters. And then also this numerical trigram tradition with which Kalinowski associates the Moshi Sholobu, the method of Maheshvara in Dunhuang. You have that use of numbers and the mantic use of numbers as fu, as talismans, as gua, as mantic images. Perhaps that also recommends itself for the use of numbers in Chinese culture. The adaptability here is one of the few constants in the tradition. And then in Tibetan, we don't have the use of numbers until probably the 12th century. I'm not sure what the earliest attestation is of a Tibetan written numeral. So the use of pictorial representation of pips also creates an intimacy, a kind of one-to-one relationship between the figure on the die and the figure on the page. All right, so those are some of the questions that we've brought up. I think one of the takeaways would be emphasizing just how global this tradition is, how widespread it is, how it comes from India, how despite its perceived indigeneity, how adaptable it is in terms of just reading a Turkish or just reading a Tibetan text and how indigenous it seems, it is a technology that comes from outside and is readily adaptable to the poetics, to the pantheons, and to the cultural norms of its users. So thank you.