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Tibetan and Mongolian Studies of the Academician Theophilus Siegfried Bayer

This article deals with one of the main directions of research of T. S. Bayer (1694—1738), the first orientalist at the Russian Academy of Sciences. His interest in Tibetan and Mongolian writings was formed several years before his arrival in St. Petersburg, but it was instigated mainly by the sources connected with Russia. In the 1720s, two preliminary works by Bayer on this topic were published, one of them containing a translation of a text related to the ritual practice of Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism, the first one in the history of European science. After moving to Russia, Bayer got the opportunity to publish a three-graphic syllabary that had been brought from Siberia by D. G. Messerschmidt (1685—1735) and contained a full set of letters and ligatures of the Indian Rañjana (Lañtsa) script, Tibetan and Mongolian alphabets. The circumstances of the acquaintance of the two scholars had a tragic connotation for Messerschmidt, who was deprived of the right to deal with the collections he himself brought to Saint Petersburg, and, nevertheless, their relationship was not hostile. This is confirmed by some materials from Bayer’s personal collection, presently kept at the Glasgow University Library, in particular his copy of a small Tibetan syllabary which seems to have been provided to him by Messerschmidt (the autograph is lost). This manuscript is published in the appendix to the article.