国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

and the Turfan depression. Near to the south of the small mosque in the very mouth of the valley we found a few painted potsherds on the ground. Time did not allow of any true investigation.

The ware is red and hard-burnt; the clay has been mixed with few but rather coarse grains of sand. The colour is homogeneous through

Fig. I. Painted   the ware. At least some of the fragments have a slip of darker red on

potsherd from   both sides; the decoration consists of black lines. Pl. 2: 5 is from the

Sengim-aghiz

Size 2/3.   rim of a wide bowl; the same arrangement with two parallel vertical

lines recurs on two more sherds.' A couple of sherds are from the rims of wide bowls, probably quite low. Pl. 2 : 6 shows a more complicated pattern of bent lines. Fig. 1 is from a thin-walled vessel, but the other sherds are 7-8 mm. thick.

Professor J. G. ANDERSSON has kindly drawn my attention to the general resemblance between these few sherds and his finds of painted pottery in Kansu from an intermediary stage between his second and third period. This material is still unpublished.

Among Professor T. J. ARNE'S material from the Turkoman steppe we find certain general similarities as regards the ware, the colours and the ornamentation. I refer to our Pl. 2: 6 and a sherd from Chakhir-tepe (Bylin-Althin, Fig. 16). I have no intention, however, of drawing any far-reaching conclusions as to cultural relations out of this single conformity between one small potsherd from the Turf an region and another small potsherd from the Turkoman steppe near the Caspian Sea. Not only is the material insufficient, it is also of such nature that it cannot be made the basis of any sound conclusions.

C. TOQSUN.

When approaching the Toqsun oasis along the main road from Turfan a place yielding some painted potsherds was discovered in April 1928. The road cuts right across the site; as some human teeth were found it may be a destroyed grave. It is situated about Ioo m. to the north of the Toqsun river and less than 1 km. to the east of the bridge across the river in question. The ground is made up of loess-like clay, which further to the east is eroded to form small yardang2 ridges.

The potsherds are homogeneous both as regards ware and decoration, and the vessels have probably been of only one type.

The ware is rather thin, light brick-red in colour and of pretty good quality.

The decoration of the outside of the sherds consists of vertical black lines reaching from rim to bottom, Fig. 2 and Pl. 2 : 8-9. On the inside of the rim there is a row

1 Cf. the pattern on a vessel from Zhob, Baluchistan (Stein 1929, Pl. X, M M. N i 1).

2 Yardang is the Turki word for the small curiously table-shaped clay terraces which wind erosion has modelled out of the old land surface, e. g. in the Lop desert.

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