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

of grains have been deposited in the coffins as food supplies for the dead, than that
they have been placed there in their character of germinative seeds, i. e. to represent
a vitalizing agent for the dead, and thus belong to the complex of the fertility cult.

IV. Discussion.

Having finished the description of Cemetery 5 ("Ördek's necropolis") the
question arises: where did these people dwell before they were buried on the hill.
Because of the size of the cemetery one would expect a priori a village in the neigh-
bourhood, somewhere along The Small River, the only place where water is obtain-
able. No traces of any structures, however, were found. The sand dunes cover such
large areas in this part of the desert, in many places reaching the shores of the
river, that not only one but several ancient villages may be totally buried in the sand.
It is worth remembering that all the Lou-lan ruins are found in a region without
sand-covering.

The dwellings of this autochthon people can hardly have been very solid. If they
really possessed any stationary dwellings we have, perhaps, to reckon with some-
thing of the same sort as the present day s a t m a or reed-hut of the Lopliq. When
these are abandoned they very soon fall to pieces, and are easily hidden by even a
thin layer of drift sand.

On the other hand fragments of pottery and other small débris were abundant on
many bare clay surfaces between the sand dunes both to the south and the north of
"Ördek's necropolis", as is the case nearly everywhere in the Lop desert to the west
of the new Lop-nor — relics which partly indicate a mobile population.

This people lived under conditions very similar to the present day Lopliqs. Some
must have carried on agriculture, at least to a limited extent. Most of them, and
especially the more wealthy, owned cattle and sheep, camels and horses or asses, and
all of them practised fishing in the river and the lakes and hunting in the reeds and
on the plains. "They are as birds and wild beasts" the contemporary Chinese char-
acterized the Lou-lan people.

As the present day Lopliqs live on very much the same lines as the autochthons
of Lou-lan, a few observations may be of interest in this connection. When visiting
Sait mollah in his s a t m a at Yaqinliq-köl, which, by the way, is one of the largest
reed-huts in the region, comprising several rooms, I saw Sait's wife spinning wool
on one of the "charkhs" used in the Tarim Basin. Afterwards Mr. Chen saw her
weaving a kind of rough woollen cloth in white and black, a material which was
used for clothing, bags, saddles and the like. This is a coarse material always made
locally, which very much resembles the coarse woollen stuff in the mantles from
Cemetery 5.

88