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

Dr. Shawe in his house, and photographed by Miss Duncan.¹ This time we could not
find a single pot with painted designs in the grave. But there were linear ornaments
impressed on several of them. The only places in Ladakh, besides the graves, where
similar hand-made pottery with dark red ornaments has been found, are the ancient
ruined castles of sBalu mkhar and Alchi mkhar gog. A plate showing such pottery
is reproduced in my article "Archæological Notes on sBalu mkhar." ² Another
collection of such ornamental sherds was made at Alchi mkhar gog on our expedition
and brought to Simla. These ornaments are all of a very primitive type. They con-
sist of spirals, ladders, and a zigzag band ; and occasionally there are bunches of lines
which may represent grass or reeds.

As most of the pots had holes in their bottoms, I was led to believe that they had
fallen down from some higher position, probably from wooden boards (as are said to
exist in the rGya graves). When the irrigation water entered, the boards decayed and
gave way. As I had previously observed, when examining the graves with Dr. Shawe,
most of the pots were filled with human bones. This circumstance seems to indicate that
the ancient inhabitants of the Leh valley indulged in the gruesome practice of cutting
the corpses to pieces and filling clay pots with the fragments. This custom, which is
also found in other parts of the globe, is asserted by the Chinese to have been in vogue
in the "Empire of the Eastern Women." Some of the pots had old cracks and care-
fully bored holes on both sides of them. Thus the art of mending broken pottery with
strings must have been known to the race which built these graves.

There were, it appears, between fifteen and twenty skulls in one single grave (Plate
XXVIII, b). How many, exactly, it is difficult to state now, as we were not the first to
examine the grave. When we opened a grave in 1903, Dr. Shawe carried home three
of the skulls. He took measurements of them and writes with regard to them in his
letter of the 14th November 1905, as follows : "All the skulls I got are very decidedly
egg-shaped. The measurements taken with an ordinary pair of compasses (we have no
proper 'callipers' here) along the antero-posterior and longest transverse diameter of
the roof of the skull are (approximately) 6¾×5 inches, 6¾×5¼ inches, and 6¾×5¼
inches. Against these, the similar measurements of a skull which I got in Baltistan
from a Musulman grave, presumably that of a Balti, are 6⅜×5⅝ inches." If we convert
these measurements into the ordinary centigrade formulas of cephalic indexes, we obtain
the following numbers : three skulls from the Leh grave : 74,70 ; 77,77 ; and 77,77.
Balti skull 82,82. Unfortunately, on our visit to Leh last year, even a pair of com-
passes could not be obtained, and I therefore cannot give any numbers. But as I
have acquired an experienced eye for forms of skulls, I venture to state that all the
skulls we found in the grave last year, were most distinctly dolichocephalic, and the
formulas 74 to 77 would probably suit them all. We had also an opportunity to com-
pare them with two skulls taken by Mr. Schmitt from the graves below Leh which date