Nicholas John Sims-Williams - Biography#

Nicholas Sims-Williams studied Old and Middle Iranian languages, together with Sanskrit, Syriac and historical linguistics, at Cambridge University and went on to do a Ph.D. 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. Since 1976 he has spent his entire career at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where his teaching has covered seven Iranian languages (Avestan, Old Persian, Middle Persian, Parthian, Bactrian, Sogdian and Khotanese) and occasionally Syriac. Although he has published on all of these languages, he has concentrated in particular on the Middle Iranian languages of Eastern Iran and Central Asia, taking an equal interest in the languages themselves, with their Indo-European roots, and in their Central Asian setting, with its stimulating mixture of languages, cultures, and religions.

More detailed online biographical information may be found at http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/dzo/artikel/201/002/2548_201.pdf?t=1239870678.