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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

Mention of ' forty-six spans'.

Record notes length of silk roll.

702   THE JADE GATE BARRIER   [Chap. XIX

showing the type of the S'aka or early Kusana period in India, and as being of older appearance than that I remembered from the single tablet with Brâhmi text, N. xx. i, excavated on my first visit to the Niya Site)

When, early in 1917, I was able to turn my attention to this little relic of Indian writing and presumably Indian language from the Han Wall, the analogy of the silk strip T. xv. a. i. 3, with its Chinese inscription and its almost identical breadth, led me to hazard the conjecture that the Brâhmi legend, too, might prove to contain some record descriptive of the roll of silk fabric from the edge of which this strip had been cut off. But the only support I could see for it was in the Sanskrit word talc (tatta), ' piece [of fabric]', which appeared in Dr. Hoernle's tentative transcript of the otherwise unintelligible legend as supplied in his Appendix F. Remembrance of the most valuable help received from M. Boyer in respect of the Kharosthi inscriptions at Mirân made me turn once more to this exceptionally qualified collaborator. His painstaking scrutiny of the legend, aided by repeated examination in the original of the few characters not absolutely clear in the reproduction, has been rewarded by gratifying results. M. Boyer, in letters of March 13 and April 4, 1917, determined the reading as :

[ai]stasya pata gisli sapari.ca.

Apart from the first word, in which the initial aksara, owing to a hole in the silk, is incomplete and hence not quite certain, he was able to interpret the short record in a manner which appears to me philologically very convincing, and which accords remarkably well with archaeological considerations. Accepting pap in the obvious sense of ' piece [of cloth]', already recognized by Dr. Hoernle, he takes sapari.sa as a Prâkrit equivalent of Skr. sat + catvkrims`at, ' forty-six '. The fact that in the Prâkrit of the Kharosthi tablets from the Niya Site calvârim.tat ' forty ' appears as capari.a, and that in Pali the same decimal numeral is contracted from callâlisam into tâlisain when compounded with single numerals (e.g. in cuttâ/saun, ' forty-four '), makes this interpretation of saparis'a phonetically quite acceptable. This reading of the word as a number necessarily suggests that the preceding word gisli may designate a measure. No such term is found in Sanskrit, but it is just from such a form that we can most appropriately derive the word gillh, gilk, meaning ' span', which M. Boyer quotes from modern Panjabi,2 and which, as Sir George Grierson has been good enough to point out to me, is found also in Kâshmiri gith, with the confusion between cerebral and dental typical in Dardic or ' Pigaca ' languages.

This interpretation of gist/ appears to me all the more convincing because, if the record on the edge of the silk piece referred to the round roll of silk itself—it is always in this rolled form that silk is carried in Chinese trade nowadays, just as the roll L.A. 1. 002 proves it for antiquity—, there was an obvious reason for its showing the length of the piece. The other details which the Chinese inscription on T. xv. a. i. 3, Doc., No. 539, records, about its weight, price, etc., were not always essential, especially for the foreign trader carrying his purchased goods to distant countries with different measures, money, etc. The width of the silk was always visible to him and his purchasers without opening the roll of silk. But the length he had certainly to note for his own convenience, if the troublesome unrolling was to be avoided on every occasion. In short, while the Chinese inscription is such as would naturally recommend itself to the producer or wholesale exporter of the fabric as a guiding record, the Brâhmi note, in a strange script and language, was just a brief memorandum intended by the trader from the West for his own guidance. Chinese inscriptions of similar length and

M. Boyer's decipherment of Brâhmi record.

' C f. Ancient Kholan, i. pp. 369, 376, 412.

2 Sir G. Grierson believes that the word ' belongs rather to Lahndâ or Western Panjâhi, which has a large "Pigaca" element in its vocabulary.' But against this M. Boyer ob

serves that Dr. Hari Chand, himself a native of the Panjâb, declared the word to be in common use throughout the province, even as far east as Delhi. I am unable to follow up this point further at present.