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

A pair of leather shoes or slippers are 23-23.5 cm. long, Pl. 21 : 8.. The inner sole has some light-brown hair left. The same footgear was also used by Chinese and Indian monks in the Turf an region during the T'ang dynasty, as seen on the fresco paintings, e. g. at Bezeklik, and it has remained in use among the Chinese until this day.

Textiles.

As the textile material is going to be the subject of a special volume in this Report series, in which Miss Vlvi SYLWAN will give descriptions and publish the results of her thorough studies of the material both from a technical, historical and artistic point of view, I need only touch superficially on the very important silk fabrics found mixed up with all the other objects in this collective grave.

In STEIN'S mass-graves the bodies, or what was left of them, were tightly wrapped with silk rags from old garments. HEDIN does not mention anything of this sort in his annotations concerning Mass-grave 1, only that everything was found lying heaped in no special order. It is quite clear that several of the rags have formed parts of garments, e. g. Nos. 34: 4o, 41, 46-48, 5o. In Pl. 21 : 7 is seen a child's tunic of blue-green silk rep with a collar of undyed silk taffeta; the sleeves are short, and the lower part of the tunic is rather wide.

Most of the silk fabrics are plain. Pl. 25 : 2-3, however, show two patterned samples, both from garments, and having a common ground-pattern of rectangles with concave ends. Beside these rectangles the piece Pl. 25 : 3, which has formed the lower part of a sleeve, has a row of cash-figures. The lozenges are those typical of Chinese Han dynasty silk, and the whole pattern closely recalls that of some Chinese silks found at Palmyra, which are not later than the third century A. D. (Pfister, Figs. 8, II-12).

Pl. 25 : 2 has also a lozenge pattern beside the rectangles, but this is very f ragmentary.

One of the larger fragments of a garment is adorned with a narrow edging of a beautiful polychrome silk in warp-rib, Pl. 23 : 3, cut obliquely from the fabric that is woven after the same pattern as STEIN'S L.C.o7.a (Stein 1928, Pl. XXXIV). The colours are of the same shade as those on STEIN'S piece though they are arranged a little differently. Two interwoven Chinese characters, jen hsiu, form a part of the sentence Han Jen hsius etc. as treated by Prof. GILES in Appendix I to STEIN'S "Innermost Asia", p. 1045. It is interesting to note that the two characters on one side of the pouch Pl. 23 : I are apparently identical with the two last ones in the sentence just referred to, and they correspond to Prof GILES' rendering, not to that proposed by M. AUROUSSEAU (cited in the same appendix of "Innermost Asia").

That we have to deal with a silk of the Han dynasty is beyond doubt. The shape

I25