Badrozzaman Qarib Museum opens at Academy of Persian Language and Literature

TEHRAN – A museum and library has been established named after Persian language and literature scholar, writer and linguist Badrozzaman Qarib at the Academy of Persian Language and Literature.  The museum is actually Qarib’s office in the academy where she was a permanent member and includes a number of her awards, family photos, letters and memorabilia.

Her personal library, which is home to a collection of rare books on ancient languages as well as her documents and personal writings, has also been situated at the central library of the academy next to other scholars’ collections. The museum was due to open on the birthday anniversary of Qarib in her presence on August 22, but unfortunately, the scholar died last month on July 28.

Badrozzaman Qarib died at the age of 91 apparently of COVID19. Qarib was famous for her research work on a dictionary of the Sogdian language. Born in 1929, Qarib got her Ph.D. in ancient languages from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a graduate of Persian literature from the University of Tehran.

She had studied Persian and history with great scholars such as Mohammad Moin, Ehsan Yarshater and Ebrahim Purdavud, where she found her deep interest in ancient Iranian languages and continued her studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Qarib was an expert on the Sogdian language. Sogdian is one of the Eastern Middle Iranian languages once spoken in Sogdiana (northern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) before the Islamization of the area in the 10th century.

Sogdians were traders along the Silk Roads and founded many diasporas along the routes, with the result that the bulk of their material was discovered in Turfan and Dunhuang in western China. The Sogdian language was written in three scripts, Sogdian, Manichean and Syriac. While only religious texts were written in Manichean and Syriac scripts, other kinds of texts, both religious and secular, were recorded in Sogdian script, which was a kind of a national script, although it ultimately originated from Aramaic script.

Qarib’s noteworthy credits are a dictionary of the Sogdian language into Persian and English, “Structural Analysis of Verbs in the Sodigan Language”, “Silent Languages” and “Sodigan Studies”.

Courtesy of Tehran Times