Edward William West Notebooks

Edward William West (1824–1905) was a pioneering scholar of Zoroastrianism and its literature in Middle Persian (Pahlavi). His major works include his survey of Pahlavi literature in the Grundriss der Iranischen Philologie (1896–1904), his five-volume translation of the Pahlavi Texts in the Sacred Books of the East series (1880–1897), and his edition and translation of the Arda Wiraf Nāmag, produced in collaboration with Martin Haug (1872).

Less widely known is West’s extensive work describing, copying and collating Zoroastrian manuscripts, some of which are now lost or no longer accessible. This important but unpublished part of his scholarship survives in his notebooks, preserved in the Library of the Royal Asiatic Society in London. They constitute a valuable resource for the study of Zoroastrian literature, manuscript transmission and the history of Iranian scholarship.

This collection provides online access to 54 digitised notebooks, which can be explored using the IIIF image viewer. Further descriptive information is available through the WEST digital repository (https://west.soas.hasdai.org/).

Digitisation and acknowledgements

The notebooks were digitised by members of the Multimedia Yasna (MUYA) project at SOAS University of London, in collaboration with the Royal Asiatic Society. The project was supported by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant (2016–2021), led by Professor Almut Hintze. The accompanying digital repository was developed through a subsequent collaboration involving SOAS, the Royal Asiatic Society, and Data Futures GmbH, a partner of the InvenioRDM Consortium, based at CERN.