*Result*: Colophons in Tocharian Manuscripts

*International audience ; Colophons have rarely been preserved in Tocharian manuscripts, as the final leaves of pustaka format manuscripts are often destroyed or lost. The corpus features, however, a significant number of sub-colophons, i.e. colophons written at the end of the sections of a longer Buddhist work. A particular instance are those colophons of the chapters of the drama about Maitreyasamiti in Tocharian A, that may be compared with the parallel colophons in the Old Uyghur text Maitrisimit nom bitig, translated from Tocharian. In addition to the author and translator names, these colophons contain the name and the number of the chapters. Several colophons have been transmitted with a text containing the names of the donors who sponsored manuscript copy. This mention is frequently accompanied by wishes and words of praise, highlighting the reward donors and their family expect from copying a sacred text. Similar instances are to be found in manuscripts in Tocharian B. In both Tocharian languages, one may observe the development of writing colophons in verse, as a literary practice that certainly gained significance for Buddhist culture in the Tarim Basin during the second half of the first millennium CE.*