| 1 | Name: | Dr. Nicholas Sims-Williams | |
| Institution: | University of London | ||
| Year Elected: | 2014 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1949 | ||
Nicholas Sims-Williams is Research Professor of Iranian and Central Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, whose faculty he joined in 1976. Nicholas Sims-Williams is an Iranologist, a philologist and linguist who has brought the little-known world of Iranian Central Asia to vivid life by his studies of religious texts, especially concerning Manichaeism and Buddhism, and everyday documents in a host of languages, above all Sogdian and Bactrian. The latter was practically lost to memory when Sims-Williams deciphered a trove of ancient legal documents and letters found in Afghanistan and identified their language as Bactrian, reconstructing its grammar and vocabulary and recovering six hundred years of a lost culture - "the most exciting discovery in Iranian Studies in the last two decades," as it was called in the introduction to his 2009 Festschrift. He was awarded the Prix Ghirshman of the Institut de France and the Hirayama Prize from the Institute of Silk Road Studies. Sims-Williams is the author of The Christian Sogdian Manuscript C2, 1985; Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan, Vol. I: Legal and Economic Documents, 2001; Recent Discoveries in the Bactrian Language and Their Historical Significance, 2004; (with F. de Blois) Dictionary of Manichaean Texts, Vol. II, Texts from Iraq and Iran, 2006; Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan, Vol. 2: Letters and Buddhist Texts, 2007. He is a member of the British Academy and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Institut de France. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |||