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

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0170 Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2
中国砂漠地帯の遺跡 : vol.2
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 / 170 ページ(カラー画像)

New!引用情報

doi: 10.20676/00000213
引用形式選択: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR読み取り結果

complete document neatly written in bold black characters,
and measuring about fifteen by nine and a half inches.
I could not attempt a decipherment, nor more than con-
jectures about the language in which this and the other ten
as yet unopened documents were written. But in the very
fact of this Semitic writing turning up on the border of
China and in the material used for it, there was enough
to keep my thoughts busy. Were these papers perhaps
in some Iranian tongue, and were they left behind by some
early traders from Sogdiana, or still farther west, who had
come for the silk of the distant Seres while the route was
kept open for direct trade from China to the regions on the
Jaxartes and Oxus? How had they found their way into
the rubbish heap of a lonely watch-station far removed from
the actual Lop-nor route?
No less curious was the chronological puzzle. From
the position in which these papers had been found, close
to Chinese records on wood, it appeared highly probable
that they must have found their way into the rubbish heap
approximately at the same period. Now, among the
tablets, over a dozen in number, the two exactly dated
ones belonged, as already stated, to the years 1 and 20 A.D.;
among the rest there were several which by the dynastic
style used in the designation of a certain military body
proved clearly to date from the reign of the usurper Wang
Mang (9-23 A.D.).
The early form of Aramaic script presented by the
documents would agree well enough with such a dating.
Yet how to account for the material on which they were
written, considering that the first discovery of paper in
China is attributed by reliable historical texts to the year
102 A.D.? An explanation might possibly be found, I
thought, in the references which M. Chavannes has un-
earthed in early Chinese texts to 'silk paper,' introduced
some time before the manufacture of real paper from rags
and bark was invented. Curiously enough, as if to illustrate
in a palpable fashion what these texts record of the use
of silk fabrics as a still earlier writing material, the same
refuse layer had furnished a small strip of cream-coloured
silk inscribed with a fragmentary line in Kharoshthi. It