The Foundations of Khotanese Verse

This article provides a critical reassessment of the current theories on the meter of Old Khotanese poetry, mainly attested in the Buddhist poem “The Book of Zambasta”. As a premise, it is claimed that a comparison with Classical metrical theory can offer tried and tested methodological principles on which to build a theory of Khotanese verse using a strictly empirical-descriptive approach. Then, the currently accepted ideas on the foundational principles of Khotanese verse are subject to a thorough critique to verify whether they are true and provable. The main result of this study is the demonstration that the importance of the concepts of “cadence” and “caesura”, traditionally considered as structural features of Khotanese verse, should be drastically reduced, and that no such thing as a “metrical accent” or “ictus” matching word-stress can be proved to exist.