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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0315 Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2
中国砂漠地帯の遺跡 : vol.2
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 / 315 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

We are taken to a field of Buddhist propaganda much farther in the West by a number of rolls and Pothi fragments written in a script which, like that used later by the Uigurs, was derived from the Syriac alphabet but here serves for the record of a language undoubtedly Iranian (Fig. 192, 8). To Professor F. W. K. Müller, of the University of Berlin and one of the most learned of living Orientalists, belongs the merit of having first recognized in fragments of similar script brought back from Turfan by Prof. A. Grünwedel's expedition remnants of that Sogdian language which was a branch of Middle Persian spoken in ancient Sogdiana, corresponding roughly to the present Samarkand and Bokhara. We knew already from Chinese and other sources that Buddhism had penetrated early to that region from India through what is now Afghanistan, and that it flourished there until the Arab conquest in the eighth century A.D. The Turfan fragments deciphered by Professor F. W. K. Müller established the fact that people from Sogdiana, both Buddhists and Manichaeans, were widely spread through the northern portions of what is now Chinese Turkestan, and that they continued to use there Sogdian translations of their respective scriptures.

The Sogdian manuscripts discovered among the con- tents of the hidden library at the 'Thousand Buddhas' now prove that this Iranian influence spread much farther eastwards and into China proper. As far as Professor Müller has been able to examine them, they contain trans- lations from the canonical literature of Buddhism. The close agreement in outward appearance and paper suggests that they were mostly written in a region where Chinese influence prevailed, perhaps at Tun-huang itself. The interpretation of Sogdian texts, owing to the inadequacy of the language material hitherto available and to other causes, still presents great difficulties. Hence the philo- logical value of these new and more extensive materials— one of the well-preserved rolls measures over seventeen feet—is bound to prove considerable.

It is in connection with these texts in Sogdian lan- guage that I may conveniently mention the discovery,