Harold Walter Bailey

Harold Walter Bailey
Born	16 December 1899 Devizes
Died	11 January 1996 Cambridge
Occupation	Scholar

Sir Harold Walter Bailey,

In 1921 he entered the University of Western Australia to study classics. In 1927, after completing his master's degree on Euripides, he won a Hackett Studentship to Oxford where he joined the Delegacy of Non-Collegiate Students, later St Catherine's College. There he studied under Frederick William Thomas.^[1]

After graduating with first class honours in 1929, Bailey was appointed as Parsee Community Lecturer in the then

Bailey was not religious in his personal life. He was a vegetarian and enjoyed playing the violin.^[1] He retired in 1967. After his death, he left his enormous library to the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge.

Work

Bailey has been described as one of the greatest Orientalists of the twentieth century. He was said to read more than 50 languages.

In 1929 Bailey began his doctoral dissertation, a translation with notes of the Greater Bundahishn, a compendium of Zoroastrian writings in Middle Persian recorded in the Pahlavi scripts. He became the world's leading expert in the Khotanese dialect of the Saka language, the mediaeval Iranian language of the Kingdom of Khotan (modern Xinjiang). His initial motivation for the study of Khotanese was an interest in the possible connection with the Bundahishn.^[1] He later passed his material on that work to Kaj Barr.^[3]

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."^[4]

Selected publications

• 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 [the summary in Khotan Saka by], Canberra : Australian National University, Faculty of Asian Studies, 1971.
• Dictionary of Khotan Saka. Cambridge University Press. 1979. 1st Paperback edition 2010.
  ISBN 978-0-521-14250-2
  .
• The culture of the Sakas in ancient Iranian Khotan, Delmar, N.Y. : Caravan Books, 1982.

• British Academy Review - memoir
• British Academy Review - centenary
• St Catherine's College Oxford
• Encyclopaedia Iranica biography and bibliography^{[permanent dead link]} by John Sheldon
• "In Honour of Sir Harold Bailey". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 33 (1). 1970.
  JSTOR i225483
  .
• "Obituary: Sir Harold Bailey 1899-1996", Nicholas Sims-Williams, George Hewitt, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 60, No. 1 (1997), pp. 109–116.
  JSTOR 620774