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Nicholas Sims-Williams is Professor of Iranian and Central
Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London. He studied Iranian languages and Sanskrit at Cambridge University and
went on to do a PhD there under Dr Ilya Gershevitch, his thesis being an
edition of a fragmentary manuscript containing Christian texts translated from
Syriac into Sogdian, the Iranian language of medieval Samarkand. This was later
published as The Christian Sogdian manuscript C2, Berlin 1985, and awarded the
Prix Ghirshman of the Institut de France.
Professor Sims-Williams was elected a Fellow of
the British Academy in 1988 and is also a member of the French and Austrian
Academies. He is particularly interested in the Middle Iranian languages of
pre-Islamic Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia, being equally fascinated by the
languages themselves, with their Indo-European roots, and by their Central Asian
setting, with its stimulating mixture of languages, cultures, and religions. At
present he is engaged in deciphering and publishing a cache of documents in the
little-known Bactrian language (see Bactrian documents from Northern
Afghanistan, I: Legal and economic documents, Oxford, 2000).
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