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Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1 |
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pieces, three distinct languages—one is Sanskrit,
one a language simply called Central Asian, and
Prof. Hoerule, to whom I showed the bundle bought
by me, says a third language, not yet deciphered,
also appears in some of the fragments.
Whether all the leaves in the manuscript as handed
to me had been taken from the same site, Father
Hendricks could not learn. Those in Sanskrit are
almost wholly Buddhist sacred literature, and they
constitute the bulk of the whole. Their approxi-
mate date is 750 A.D. The other fragments have
not yet been studied sufficiently to fix a date.
Prof. Hoerule, in the short afternoon which we
spent together at Oxford, was able to determine
only this as to the non-sacred, non-Sanskrit pieces
—that they seemed to contain a contract for agri-
cultural materials. I hope some of our scholars may
be interested to probe deeper. Prof. Hoerule was
good enough to say that he would be glad to corre-
spond with any one desiring the aid of his work,
which stands almost alone in this field. As it is not
probable that other examples of these finds will be
seen in this country for some time, I have placed
these in the Congressional Library, with request that
they be made available, as far as possible, to any
inquiring paleograph.
The discoveries thus far made indicate that during
a period of about four hundred years there was a
progressive diminishment of the habitable area. It
is ever shrinking toward the sources of the streams,
which find it ever more difficult to fix a constant
course across the wind-swept sands. Thus we see
the desert as destroyer, the desert as preserver, but
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