Everything about Harold Walter Bailey totally explained
Sir Harold Walter Bailey (December 16, 1899 - January 11, 1996), who published as
H. W. Bailey, was an eminent
English scholar of
Khotanese,
Sanskrit, and the comparative study of
Iranian languages.
Bailey was born in
Devizes,
Wiltshire, and raised from age 10 onwards on a farm in western Australia without formal education. While growing up, he learned
German,
Italian,
Spanish,
Latin, and
Greek from household books, and
Russian from a neighbor. After he grew interested in the lettering on tea-chests from
India, he acquired a book of Bible selections translated into languages with non-European scripts, including
Tamil,
Arabic, and
Japanese. By the time he'd left home, he was reading
Avestan as well.
In 1921 he entered the
University of Western Australia to study classics. In 1927, after completing his master's degree on
Euripedes, he won a Hackett Studentship to
Oxford where he joined the Delegacy of Non-Collegiate Students, later
St Catherine's College. After graduating with first class honours in 1929, he was appointed as Parsee Community Lecturer in the then
London School of Oriental Studies. That same year he began his doctoral dissertation, a translation with notes of the
Greater Bundahisn, a compendium of
Zoroastrian writings in
Middle Persian recorded in the
Pahlavi script. In 1937 he became Chair of Sanskrit and a Fellow at
Queens' College, Cambridge and was succeeded at
SOAS by
W. B. Henning. He retired in 1967.
Bailey has been described as one of the greatest Orientalists of the twentieth century. He was said to read more than 50 languages, and was the world's leading expert in
Khotanese, the mediaeval
Iranian language of the kingdom of
Khotan in Chinese
Turkestan. He was known for his immensely erudite lectures, and once confessed: "I have talked for ten and a half hours on the problem of one word without approaching the further problem of its meaning." After his death, he left his enormous library to the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge.
Bailey was elected a Fellow of the
British Academy in 1944, and subsequently a member of the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Academies. He received honorary degrees from four universities including Oxford; served as president of Philological Society, the
Royal Asiatic Society, the Society for Afghan Studies, and the Society of Mithraic Studies; and chaired the Anglo-Iranian Society and Ancient India and Iran Trust. He was knighted for services to Oriental studies in 1960.
Selected works
- Codices khotanenses, Copenhagen : Levin & Munksgaard, 1938.
- Zoroastrian problems in the ninth-century books, Oxford : The Clarendon press, 1943.
- Khotanese texts, Cambridge : The University Press, 1945
- Khotanese Buddhist texts, London : Taylor’s Foreign Press, 1951.
- Sad-dharma-puṇḍarīka-sūtra [thesummary in Khotan Saka by], Canberra : Australian National University, Faculty of Asian Studies, 1971.
- Dictionary of Khotan Saka, Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1979.
- The culture of the Sakas in ancient Iranian Khotan, Delmar, N.Y. : Caravan Books, 1982.
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