Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 / Page 429 (Color Image)

0429	Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1

known in Central Asia. As to *Go, the frequent occurrence in the Khotan region of names
which were sanskritized as Gomati, *Gomasālagandha, etc., is certainly striking, but I do not
see that much more can be said for the present. *Go may be the name of the country, or of
the people. It has certainly nothing to do with Ch. 五 wu (*nguo), «five», nor can it, in my
opinion, mean «west» or «mountains of the west», as has been suggested by Thomas (Asia
Major, II, 257, 259).

Herrmann sees Khotan in Ptolemy's Χαύρανα (VI, 15, 4), which he proposes to correct to
Χαύτανα (Southern Tibet, VIII, 452; Das Land der Seide, 121, 145 [where Χαυράνα seems to be
a misprint]). Χαύρανα is supported, however, by Χαυρανᾶιοι Σκύθαι in Ptolemy VI, 15, 3, and
by Chauriana in Ammianus Marcellinus. Although the oldest native forms I have deduced
begin with g- it may be that the name was already sounded with an initial b-, in Sogdian, in
Ptolemy's time. But the identification of the Ptolemean nomenclature is still for the most
part so uncertain that I must abstain from dogmatizing in the present case.

While Yü-t'ien and Yü-tun presuppose *'Odan and *'Odon respectively, other ancient
transcriptions show a median -t- instead of -d-. One is in the Syriac catena which mentions
«the Śakiamunaye, i. e. the Tuptaye and the black 'Otnaye», that is to say the disciples of
Śākyamuni, who are the Tibetans (see «Tebet») and the black Khotanese (cf. Bidez and Cumont,
Les mages hellénisés, II, 117). Because of the mention of the Tibetans, I do not think that
this part of the catena can be older than the 7th-8th cent. (see «Sagamoni Burcan»). By its
-t-, 'Otnaye, an ethnical name derived from 'Otn (= 'Otān), is in the line of the Iranian (Sogdian ?)
Ḥwātan, but does not show the same strong aspiration at the beginning of the word. It is never-
theless certainly a «Western» form, which is not directly connected with *'Odan or *'Odon.

The Tibetan form is more surprising. There is a purely Tibetan name of Khotan, Li-yul,
«the Li country», li being the Tibetan word for «bell-metal», in Skr. kaṃsá; the name has
not been accounted for (cf. Stein, Ancient Khotan, 155; Thomas, in Asia Major, II, 255).
But Tibetan chronicles also speak occasionally of Khotan as 'U-then and 'U-ten (cf. Thomas, in
Asia Major, II, 256-257; Tibetan Texts and Documents, I, 129, 306). This is no doubt a form
borrowed from the Chinese Yü-t'ien. The use of 'U-ten or 'U-then instead of *U-den finds a
parallel in the name of the Goṣṛṅga Hill of Khotan, called in Chinese 牛頭山 Niu-t'eu-shan
(*Ngiou-d'ʒu-ṣan), «Ox-head Mountain»; this Chinese name appears in the Tibetan texts relating
to Khotan as 'Ge'u-to-šan or Gau-to-šan (cf. JA, 1914, II, 144-145; Thomas, Tibetan Texts and
Documents, I, 6). We have seen that the t'ien of Yü-t'ien (*Jju-d'ien) is recorded as pronounced
in two different tones; our modern reading Yü-t'ien is based on the p'ing-shêng pronunciation;
read in the ch'ü-shêng, it would regularly give a modern tien. The passage from the sonant
initial to the surd (with or without aspiration according to the tone) dates from c. A. D. 1000
in Northern China, but did not take place simultaneously over the whole of China. It may be
that the Tibetans who wrote down the chronicles of Khotan in Tibetan had already heard the
ancient sonant initials of the p'ing-shêng as surd aspirates, which would account for
'U-ten or 'U-then and for 'G'eu-to-šan or Gau-to-šan (S. C. Das's explanation of 'U-then as
lNa-ldan or Pañcavati, «the Quintuple», in JASB, LV, 195, is absurd, and ought to have been
alluded to by Thomas, in Ancient Khotan, 583).

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National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

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National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books