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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
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| 0455 |
Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan : vol.1 |
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OCR Text
'stovana'; the oblong tablets with envelopes as 'lihitaka,' or
"letter"; the documents on leather as 'anadilekha,' or
"rescript," &c. It is evident that the clerks of those ancient
offices had quite as keen a sense for bureaucratic distinctions of
this kind as the Babu of modern India, who would never make a
mistake about supplying himself with "octavo note" for his
D.O's, foolscap for his "fair dockets," or slips for his "office
memos."
The necessarily brief notes here presented will suffice to show
that these Kharoshthi documents are bound to bring back to light
many aspects of life and culture in an early period of Central-
Asian history which seemed almost entirely lost from our field of
vision. The very nature of the contents and the complete absence
of similar records of ancient date in India itself will render their
full elucidation a slow and laborious task. But whatever revelations
of interesting detail may be in store for us, one important historical
fact already stands out clearly. The use of an Indian language in
the vast majority of the documents, when considered together with
their secular character, strikingly confirms the old local tradition
recorded by Hiuen-Tsiang and also in old Tibetan texts, but
hitherto scarcely credited, that the territory of Khotan was
conquered and colonised about two centuries before our era by
Indian immigrants from Takshasila, the Taxila of the Greeks, in
the extreme North-West of the Punjab. It is certainly a significant
fact that within India the Kharoshthi script used in our tablets was
peculiar to the region of which Taxila was the historical centre.
Neither the language nor the script presented by our documents
can satisfactorily be accounted for by the spread of Buddhism
alone, seeing that the latter, so far as our available evidence goes,
brought to Central Asia only the use of Sanskrit as the ecclesiasti-
cal language, and the writing in Brahmi characters.
It seemed strange that these ruins far away in the barbarian
North, overrun by what Hindu legends vaguely knew as the "great
sand ocean," should have preserved for us in an Indian language
records of everyday life older than any written documents (as dis-
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