On the Kushan Bactrian Ablative-Instrumental Case

The present paper argues for the existence of an ablative-instrumental case in Kushan Bactrian with the endings -α (from original a-stems) and -να ~ -νο (from the Old Iranian pronominal declension). While the corpus is small and many details remain unknown or speculative, there are enough such case forms to show that the Kushan Bactrian case system is more archaic than often thought. It further becomes clear from the examples that the ablative-instrumental case had largely two functions: Several times it is used a prepositional case and, once, to mark the ergative agent of a transitive past tense verb. The existence of an ablative-instrumental in Bactrian as such, its endings and its functions have good parallels in other Middle and New Iranian languages spoken in the region, and should therefore not be too surprising for the Bactrian language of the 2nd century A.D.