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| 0180 |
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 |
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only access to a well or shaft, about five or six feet square,
which we cleared to a depth of over twelve feet without
reaching the bottom. The earth roof of the shaft had
originally been supported by timber, but now fell in, luckily
without smothering any one. Dozens of wooden documents
turned up in the sand cleared out, almost all, alas! badly
decayed through damp, but some still showing legible dates
of the first decades after Christ; and from these I concluded
that this curious shaft had been filled up with refuse not
very long after that period. Its original purpose seemed
obscure, until Chiang and some of my Muhammadans
rightly suggested that it must have been intended for a
dungeon, the use of similar wells for the safe keeping of
dangerous prisoners being still remembered in Chinese
Turkestan.
In fact, I subsequently ascertained that such methods of
burying prisoners as it were alive subsisted in the Central-
Asian Khanats, too, until the time of the Russian conquest.
The narrow side opening near the top of the well had, no
doubt, served as an air-hole. I did not care at the time
to think much of the horrors which this dungeon might
have witnessed; but the fact that one of the inscribed
slips here recovered, contains, according to M. Chavannes'
translation, an order about the burial of a man who
had died after having been beaten, has since helped to
recall them. Curiously enough, the well-preserved ancient
beating-stick of the traditional shape, shown in Fig. 172,
was found on this very mound.
Of the structures which the top of the hillock had once
borne, nothing but the scantiest foundations were dis-
covered. But deposits of ancient rubbish laid bare at
different points of the slopes yielded records on wood in
abundance. From one refuse area near the centre close
on five dozen documents were recovered. As almost all
the dated pieces belonged to the years 96-94 B.C., it
became quite certain that the occupation of this site went
back to the time when the Limes was first established.
That the station had then already been one of import-
ance was proved by several documents emanating direct from
the commandant of the 'Jade Gate Barrier.' Others too
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