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0171 On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1
中央アジア踏査記 : vol.1
On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1 / 171 ページ(カラー画像)

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doi: 10.20676/00000214
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which, as described in the next chapter, came to light on
my second visit to the site. Other rectangular double tablets
have proved to contain letters dealing with private affairs
which their writers obviously wished to keep between them-
selves and their correspondents. Of considerable philological
interest are some tablets containing passages from Buddhist
texts in Sanskrit.

The language used throughout all these Kharoshthi docu-
ments is an early Indian Prakrit with a large admixture of
Sanskrit terms. We have good reason to suppose that not
only the script, but also this language was derived from
the extreme north-west of the Panjab and the adjacent
trans-Indus tracts. In India no writings of such early date,
concerned with everyday life and administration, have
survived. This fact invests these records found so far away
to the north of the Himalayas with still greater interest.
Their discovery in this region seems curiously bound up
with the old local tradition, recorded by Hsüan-tsang and
also in old Tibetan texts, that the territory of Khotan
was conquered and colonized about two centuries before
our era by Indian immigrants from Takshasila, the Taxila
of the Greeks, in the extreme north-western corner of the
Panjab.

The titles given to the rulers in whose name orders are
issued and with reference to whose reigns the more elaborate
documents are dated (Maharaja, devaputra, 'son of the gods',
etc.) are purely Indian. They agree strikingly with the
official nomenclature observed under the Kushana or Indo-
Scythian princes who ruled over the extreme north-west
of India and Afghanistan in the first centuries of our era.
The names of the persons which occur in the documents