The Parchments of Avroman (or Awraman) are three
parchment
Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared untanned skins of animals—primarily sheep, calves, and goats. It has been used as a writing medium for over two millennia. Vellum is a finer quality parchment made from the skins of ...
documents, found in 1909 in a cave in the
Hawraman
Avroman or Hawraman, ( ku, ههورامان, translit=Hewraman, fa, اورامان) is a mountainous region located within the provinces of Kurdistan and Kermanshah in western Iran and in north-eastern Kurdistan Region in Iraq. The main part o ...
region of Iranian
Kurdistan
Kurdistan ( ku, کوردستان ,Kurdistan ; lit. "land of the Kurds") or Greater Kurdistan is a roughly defined geo-cultural territory in Western Asia wherein the Kurds form a prominent majority population and the Kurdish culture, Kurdish la ...
. They were found in Tang-i Var, Kuh-e Salan Mountain, near the village of Shahr Hawraman. The documents were found in a sealed jar by a villager, and then sent to London in October 1913.
The documents date from 88/87 BC to 33 AD, with two written in
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
and one in
Parthian Parthian may be:
Historical
* A demonym "of Parthia", a region of north-eastern of Greater Iran
* Parthian Empire (247 BC – 224 AD)
* Parthian language, a now-extinct Middle Iranian language
* Parthian shot, an archery skill famously employed by ...
. They document the sale of a vineyard and other land, and include the names of Pātaspak, son of Tīrēn and Awīl, son of Baænīn.
They were translated by
philologist
Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as th ...
Ellis H. Minns and published in the ''Journal of Hellenic Studies''.
References
1st-century manuscripts
1st-century BC manuscripts
Archaeological discoveries in Iran
1909 in Iran
Parthian language
Greek manuscripts
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