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

> > > >
カラー New!IIIFカラー高解像度 白黒高解像度 PDF   日本語 English
0152 On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1
中央アジア踏査記 : vol.1
On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1 / 152 ページ(カラー画像)

New!引用情報

doi: 10.20676/00000214
引用形式選択: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR読み取り結果

conscience to become unduly triumphant. It was true that
the collected text of the hundred odd tablets I was carrying
away as the result of my first day's work could not fall short
of, if it did not exceed, the aggregate of all previously avail-
able Kharoshthi writings. But might not these strange re-
cords prove to be mere replicas of the same text, perhaps
a prayer or an extract from some sacred Buddhist text?

Once in the comparative shelter of my tent I began with
impatience to examine the best preserved of these tablets.
I was prepared from previous experience of Kharoshthi
epigraphy for the exceptional difficulties likely to be pre-
sented by the cursive character of the writing and by all
the uncertainties as to language, etc. Yet, sitting up in the
cold of that evening wrapped in my furs—the thermometer
showed next morning a minimum of forty-one degrees of
frost—I gained assurance on two important points. A series
of philological observations convinced me that the language
was an early Indian Prakrit. It became equally certain that
the text varied greatly, notwithstanding the same brief
initial formula with which most of them opened. When later
on I had definitely deciphered this formula as reading
mahanuava maharaya lihati, "His Highness the Maharaja orders
in writing", there remained no doubt that these particular
documents conveyed official orders. The conclusion seemed
thus justified that with the Kharoshthi script an early form
of Indian speech had also been transplanted into this distant
Central-Asian region, in any case for administrative use.
Such a fact might well open fresh and wholly unexpected
historical vistas over ground so far shrouded in darkness.

My eager hope for more finds of records proved well
founded when I proceeded to clear the southern wing of