IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
90 DISCOVERIES AT THE NIYA SITE CH. V
expert collaborators, Professor E. J. Rapson of Cambridge, M. E. Senart and Père Boyer, s. J., of Paris, who kindly undertook in i 902 the publication of these records.
The number of our Kharoshthi documents was greatly increased by the finds made here and at sites farther east
on my subsequent expeditions. This will help to explain,
together with delays consequent on the war, why their publication in several fasciculi could not be completed until 1928. The full interpretation of the texts thus rendered accessible to other Indologist students will still need labours
extending over many years.
Not until these exegetical labours have been carried much further will it be possible to bring into focus all the light
those records throw upon the economic and administrative conditions, the ethnic and cultural relations of the people, etc., prevailing in that region. But enough has become clear to permit of some definite glimpses being offered here. Of
the great mass of the documents it is certain that they contain, as surmised by me from the first, official correspondence
of various kinds. The bulk of this is made up of reports and
orders to local officials on matters of local administration and police; complaints; summonses; orders for safe-conduct or arrests, and similar communications. Records of pay-
ments or requisitions, accounts, lists of labourers, etc., form the usual contents of the mass of miscellaneous `papers' written on single tablets of irregular shapes and often in columns ending with numerical signs.
That a considerable proportion of the double rectangular tablets contains formal agreements and bonds was conclusively proved by the number of carefully sealed documents of this kind found unopened in a remarkable cache
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