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| 0413 |
Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan : vol.1 |
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seemed indeed to point to contents of a more practical nature—
letters, perhaps, and contracts or documents of some official
character. I knew well that the historical and antiquarian interest
of the finds, if they were really to furnish such records, would be
increased beyond all proportion. Yet the supposition seemed
almost too good to be readily indulged in.
Once in the comparative shelter of my tent, as soon as the
detailed account of the first excavations had been written up, I
began with impatience to compare and study the best preserved of
those remarkable tablets. I knew from the experience furnished
by the Dutreuil de Rhins fragments and more than one Kharoshthi
stone inscription from the Punjab, how serious a task the proper
decipherment of these documents would necessarily prove even to
the epigraphist working in his study. I was thus prepared for the
exceptional difficulties likely to be presented by the cursive
character of the writing and all the uncertainties as to the lan-
guage and contents. Yet sitting up that evening wrapped in my
furs until the increasing cold drove me to seek refuge in bed—the
thermometer showed next morning a minimum of 9° Fahr. below
zero—I gained assurance on two important points.
A series of philological observations bearing on the phonetic
value of the characters, single or compound, that could be read with
certainty, and on the recurrence of particular inflectional endings,
&c., convinced me that the language was an early Indian Prakrit,
probably of a type closely akin to the dialect found in the legends
of the oldest Khotan coins and in the Dutreuil de Rhins frag-
ments. It became equally certain from a cursory comparison of
the tablets that their text varied greatly both in extent and in
matter, notwithstanding the brief initial formula with which most
of them opened. It was only some days later that I succeeded in
definitely deciphering the latter, when its wording—mahanuava
maharaya lihati, "His Highness the Maharaja writes [thus]:"—
plainly established that these particular documents conveyed official
orders. In the meantime, however, the previous observations
together with others, such as the occurrence of numerical figures
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563
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582
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