Ancient Khotan : vol.1 / 186 ページ（カラー画像）

0186	Ancient Khotan : vol.1
古代コータン : vol.1

great, and the grazing and produce offered by them so extremely limited, that no great host
could either in modern or ancient days have attempted the passage⁷. What obstacles the
desert route from the west offered we have had occasion to note in the previous chapter.

Khotan
unsuited for
nomads. But what possible inducements were there for any nomadic tribe or nation to penetrate
these desert defences and settle down in Khotan? Only painstaking cultivation, based on the
experience of many generations, could produce and maintain the oasis. Of ground such as
the various nomadic races from the Mongolian plains and the Tibetan plateaus need for their
maintenance, the region around Khotan could never in historical times offer any. Even the
hardy Kirghiz, those last representatives of the Turkī race retaining its original nomadic
condition, who still graze their flocks in most of the mountains encircling the Tārim Basin,
have given a wide berth to the inhospitable region that borders Khotan on the south and
thence stretches eastwards into Tibet.

Tārim Basin
not on
road of
migrations. It is because the conditions here briefly indicated apply with almost equal force to all the
oases fringing the great desert of Eastern Turkestān that we find each great wave of Central-
Asian migration, of which historical records have come down to us, moving along the northern
foot of the T'ien-shan or even further north. When tracing above the general history of
Eastern Turkestān, we have seen that all the tribes which followed each other on that great
route of invasion westwards—Yüeh-chih, Huns, Hephthalites, Western Turks—were probably
able in their time to exact tribute and a more or less nominal submission from the various
small states of the Tārim Basin while Chinese power was too weak to protect them.⁸ But
nothing leads us to suppose that this political dependence during limited periods affected the
internal organization of these states and their ethnic composition, any more deeply than the
presence of Chinese garrisons in Han times and again for over a century under the T'ang
dynasty. Nor is the brief period of Tibetan predominance likely to have been accompanied
by far-reaching effects in this direction. For over a century after Tibetan power had been
finally broken by the Uigurs Khotan seems to have again enjoyed independence.

Effects of
Muham-
madan
conquest. It is only when we reach the time of the conquest of Khotan by the successors of Satok
Boghra Khān that the possibility of a radical change in the ethnical character of the population
seriously presents itself. The spread of Muhammadanism and of the Turkī language testify
to the powerful effects which followed the establishment of the Karluk Turk family of Satok
Boghra Khān in undisputed possession of the whole of Eastern Turkestān. Do these great
subversions imply that the racial character of the people brought under the new rule was also
fundamentally altered?⁹ Our historical records for the period which witnessed the conversion
to Islām, and for the centuries immediately following, are far too scanty and vague to furnish
an answer to this question. Analogies drawn from other territories of Asia, where an indigenous

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