The Silk Road: A New History

by Valerie Hansen

  Earlier scholars took the presence of so many documents in an Indic language as evidence that the Kushan Empire actually occupied Niya (after conquering it with the forces described in the official histories). More recent interpretations hold that a group of migrants from the Gandhara region could just as easily have introduced this system of document keeping to the local residents and that Niya did not come under direct rule of the Kushans.75 The persistence of so many rulers with indigenous—and not Indic—names supports the migration scenario.

  Migrants and indigenous peoples alike farmed and tended herds. They often exchanged animals, rugs, and grain for livestock—horses, camels, cattle—or slaves, a distinct social group. Children put up for adoption constituted a group between slaves and free people. Sometimes the adoptive parents made a payment, usually a horse, called a “milk payment.” If they did so, then the new family member joined the family as an equal. But if no milk payment was made, then the adopted child was treated as a slave.76

  Women participated fully in this economy. They initiated transactions, served as witnesses, brought disputes to the attention of officials, and owned land. They could adopt children and give them away, too. One woman put her son up for adoption and received a camel as milk payment. When she discovered that her birth son’s master was treating him as a slave, she took her son back and sued his adoptive father in court. The court found in her favor yet returned her son to his adoptive father, stipulating that the father henceforth had to treat the boy as his son and not a slave.77

  The residents of the village paid taxes to the Kroraina king but often fell into arrears. On one occasion, the people in one district submitted pomegranates, cloth, grain, cattle, ghee, sacks, baskets, sheep, and wine, all in order to pay back taxes. The list of goods is ample evidence that villagers made payments in a wide variety of agricultural products and locally made handicrafts.78 They recorded payments and debts in units of grain, a clear indication that it functioned as a type of money.79

  The few coins that circulated in the Kroraina Kingdom indicate that the Niya economy was only partially monetized. The Kroraina rulers did not mint their own coins but used those from neighboring Khotan and the Kushan Empire. The Kushans issued a gold coin called a stater (the soldiers of Alexander the Great originally introduced this Greek coin to the Gandhara region in the fourth century BCE), and some bronze stater coins have been found in Khotan, the oasis 150 miles (240 km) west of Niya. In addition, the Khotan kings minted their own bronze coins in imitation of the stater (with Chinese on one face, Kharoshthi on the other), which are called Sino-Kharoshthi coins.80 The different coins circulating in Niya show that the oasis’s primary trading partners were the Khotanese and the Kushan Empire, not Rome as is sometimes thought.

  Those who came to Niya from the capital tried to collect taxes in staters but did not always succeed in doing so. In a report describing the various taxes paid by the people in one district, one official cited a specific instance: “On another occasion the queen came here. She asked for one golden stater. There is no gold. Instead of it we gave carpet (tavastaga) thirteen hands long.”81 When gold coins were not available, the residents of Niya sometimes used solid gold that had not been minted into coins. In one case, someone paid off a debt with a gold necklace.82 In another, a Chinese man paid two gold staters and two silver drachma coins as compensation for a slave he received from the Supis, a raiding people living south of Khotan. This is the only transaction recorded at Niya involving silver coins, which indicates that silver coins were even less common than gold ones.83

  The residents of Niya preferred to use grain or to exchange animals rather than risk using coins, since they faced constant political instability and must have feared that any other currency might lose its value. Officials frequently allude to the losses of warfare, including cavalry attacks and plundering by the Khotanese and raids by marauding outsiders, the Supis, who are usually labeled as “dangerous.” Raids occurred so often that the local officials repeatedly refused to hear property disputes about lost items: “The established law here,” the king explained in one order, “is that what has been given or received before the plundering of the kingdom by the Khotanese cannot be the object of a legal dispute.”84

  The Kharoshthi documents mention only a handful of Chinese who lived in Niya and the surrounding villages, who owned land and were given runaway cows.85 One royal order explicitly refers to the Chinese. The king issued a wedge-shaped tablet that ordered:

  At present there are no merchants from China so that the debt of silk is not to be investigated now.… When the merchants arrive from China, the debt of silk is to be investigated. If there is a dispute, there will be a decision in our presence in the royal court.86

  Clearly the authorities associated the use of silk as currency with the Chinese and sought their expert advice. They had to wait for the Chinese merchants to arrive before they could settle the dispute about the silk, which must not have been used to make payments very often. If it had, they would have known its value.

  Usually only outsiders who did not live in the village used silk as money. In one instance, a man, most likely an official, returned from the capital with different rolls of silk, one specifically designated as “royal silk.”87 Royal laws and monastic rules drafted in the capital specified penalties in silk for violating legal procedures. The villagers of Niya converted payments in silk into the equivalent amount of grain, rugs, or animals. The coexistence of these different currencies meant that anyone buying something in the village had to decide whether to pay with coins, gold bullion, or silk or to make a barter exchange using something else.

  Even in these unstable times, the rulers of Khotan and Kroraina continued to dispatch and to host diplomatic envoys. These envoys carried gifts for local rulers. Although the documents do not specify what they were, they were probably luxury textiles like those found in tombs M8 and M3. Niya was one stop on the route from Khotan to Loulan. Diplomats were entitled to transport, usually by camel, guides, and provisions including food, meat, and wine. From Calm-adana (modern Qiemo) to Saca (Ändirlänggär), and from Saca to Nina (the site of Niya), one emissary had received a guard, but the authorities at Niya had failed to give him a guard on the final leg from Niya to Khotan.88 The king ordered that he be compensated for his out-of-pocket expenses.

  In addition to envoys, others traveled the route between Khotan and Kroraina. The Kharoshthi documents regularly use the word “runaway” to refer to the people displaced by these raids and counter raids.89 Reports of thefts show which goods these little-documented travelers carried, and, by extension which goods best retained their value in those uncertain times. One robbery victim, identified as a “runaway,” reported the theft of “four roughly woven cloths, three woolen cloths, one silver ornament, 2,500 masha [possibly Chinese coins], two jackets, two somstamni [most likely some kind of garment], two belts and three Chinese robes.”90 Although a “runaway,” he was demonstrably better off than the penniless refugees who arrived and had to depend on the authorities for assistance.

  Another robbery report specifies that “seven strings of pearls (mutilata), one mirror, a lastuga made of many-colored silk, and a sudi ear ornament” were stolen. Most pearls came from modern-day Sri Lanka, where divers dived into the ocean to find them, while mirrors and multicolored silk were made in China. In this case, the thief confessed, but claimed to have received no payment for the goods, which he no longer possessed. Despite his denials, he must have fenced the listed goods, which were all portable and easily resold.91

  The Kharoshthi documents number more than a thousand, but they use the word “merchant” only once (for the Chinese merchants who knew the price of silk).92 They mention a few robbery victims, who may or may not have been merchants. Does this mean there was minimal overland trade in a Silk Road town of the third and fourth centuries?

  The unusual circumstances leading to the preservation of excavated documents mean that only a tiny portion of the origin
al evidence survives. Still, the finds from Niya and Loulan do not consist of a single accidental find but multiple groups of documents, some deliberately buried, some carelessly discarded. These different caches of documents, with only one mention of “merchants,” and the limited use of coins do indicate that the Silk Road trade of the third and fourth centuries CE in this area was indeed minimal. These documents clearly attest to the migration of people to Xinjiang from the Gandhara region of modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. They also show how often local kings dispatched envoys to neighboring kingdoms. But the evidence of private commerce is slight.

  Read and analyzed as a group, the Kharoshthi documents illuminate the most important groups in Niya society in the third and fourth centuries. The local people, who farmed the land and maintained herds, recorded transfers of property witnessed by the cozbo and other officials. The king, living in Kroraina’s capital, frequently wrote to the cozbo with instructions to investigate a wide range of matters. Other groups—Supi raiders, refugees from Khotan, runaways, envoys—came to the settlement, and officials tried to resolve the various conflicts that arose. The main innovation brought by the refugees from Gandhara—the technology for writing on wooden documents—allowed local officials to record a wide variety of disputes and property transfers, hardly any involving long-distance luxury trade.

  In addition to their writing system, the refugees introduced Buddhist teachings, a religion new to the area that subsequently had an enormous impact on all of East Asia. The Gandharan migrants who arrived in Niya in the third and fourth centuries were already Buddhist devotees, many with Buddhist names. The documents refer to them using the standard Buddhist term shramana, usually translated as “monk.” According to Buddhist vinaya law, all shramana should have adhered to vows of celibacy. But clearly the shramana at Niya did not. They lived with wives and children, and they engaged in the same kind of disputes over milk fees and the status of adopted children that embroiled ordinary people. Many of these Buddhists, even if called shramana, lived at home with their families.

  Some Buddhists lived in distinct communities. One royal order records a set of rules issued to the “community of monks” at Niya by the “community of monks” in the capital, who appointed two elders to “be in charge of the monastery (viharavala)” to enforce these rules. The new rules concerned the posatha ceremony, on the first and fifteenth day of each lunar month, during which Buddhist rules were explained to the monastic community. Fines, in bolts of silk, were stipulated both for failing to attend the ceremony and for wearing “householder’s dress.” Such a regulation implies that members of the Buddhist order only wore Buddhist robes when attending group ceremonies.93 Other documents confirm that the community of monks met as a body and constituted a legal entity that could witness the transfer of property and decide disputes.

  Much of the evidence concerning Buddhism at Niya comes from house 24, the location of Rustam’s archive. This was a big home, with ten rooms, one measuring 25 feet (8 m) by 19 feet (6 m), and clearly the residence of a well-off person. House 24 produced four documents not in Gandhari but in a form of hybrid Sanskrit that combined classic Sanskrit grammar and vocabulary with more vernacular forms. The four documents include a list of syllables used to memorize certain teachings, a fragment of the great Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, a pratimoksha text listing rules for monks, and a long wooden plaque promising tangible benefits, including “a good complexion” and “a sweet-smelling body,” and the ultimate promise of all Buddhist teachings, “an end of birth and death” to those who wash the image of the Buddha.94 Clearly members of the Buddhist order participated in ceremonies like the bathing of the Buddha. House 24, with its large meeting room and additional nine rooms may have served as the main place for Buddhists to meet, and for some to reside on a full-time basis. Other Buddhists put on their lay clothing and returned to their families once the ceremonies had ended.

  One tantalizing Kharoshthi letter has attracted the interest of many researchers because it uses the term “Mahayana,” the Sanskrit word meaning Greater Vehicle. Adherents of the Greater Vehicle believed that even lay people could attain salvation. They applied the derogatory label Hinayana, or Lesser Vehicle, to these earlier teachings that limited the attainment of nirvana to only those who joined the monastic order. Historians of Buddhism have recently revised their earlier assessment of the black-and-white division between Hinayana and Mahayana.95 Individual monks identified themselves as members of given school depending on the vows they took at ordination. These varied slightly among the different schools, of which the Sarvastivadins and Dharmaguptakas were the most active in Central Asia in the third and fourth centuries. Once ordained, some members of a given school chose to study Mahayana teachings, while others did not, with the result that followers of Mahayana teachings lived alongside those who did not accept the teachings.

  The letter using the term “Mahayana” begins, as many letters do, with several phrases praising the virtues of the recipient, in this instance a local cozbo official named Shamasena: “At the feet of the great cozbo Shamasena, beloved of men and gods, honoured by men and gods, blessed with a good name, who set forth in the Mahayana who is of infinitely pleasing aspect, the tasuca … makes obeisance, and sends the health of his divine body, much, immeasurable.” The phrase “set forth in the Mahayana” appears in at least two other inscriptions: one, written in the mid-third century, at Endere, praises the ruler of the Shanshan Kingdom, while the other, praising the Kushan ruler Huvishka, the successor of Kanishka, appears in a fourth-century manuscript from Bamiyan, Afghanistan.96 The use of the phrase, though, does not reveal how Mahayana beliefs affected local Buddhist worship at Niya. Nor do the surviving materials indicate which schools of Buddhism were active at Niya.

  Evidently stupa worship constituted an important focus for Buddhist worship at Niya, as it had for the migrants from Gandhara who left so many drawings of stupas along the Karakorum Highway. The site’s most prominent ruin was a square-based stupa with a bowl-shaped top made from earthen bricks and grass-filled mud, shown in color plate 6. Located in the center of the settlement, it stands 23 feet (7 m) tall, with a base 18 feet (5.6 m) tall. Even in Aurel Stein’s time robbers had emptied its central chamber—where Buddhist relics and sometimes objects of value given to the Buddhist order were placed—so that it slumped over slightly.

  SQUARE STUPA AT NIYA

  This Buddhist stupa, square in shape, was unearthed in the 1990s. It measured 6.5 feet (2 m) on a side and was surrounded by a passageway for circumambulation 3.6–4.6 feet (1.1–1.4 m) across. The walkway was originally decorated with paintings, whose remnants are visible on the upper left-hand outer wall. Courtesy of Wang Binghua.

  The Niya site contained a second Buddhist stupa, square in shape, whose remains were excavated by the Sino-Japanese expedition near house 5. Similar square structures have been found at other places along the southern Silk Road, including the site of Keriya, upriver from Khotan.97 Buddhist devotees worshipped at these sites by walking clockwise around the perimeter of the square to express their devotion. The paintings in the passageway around the stupa at Niya portrayed individual buddhas, as is the case at Keriya, and no narrative scenes.

  Stein found much more elaborate Buddhist structures, including a monastery, at the site of Miran, which lay to the east, about halfway to Loulan.98 The use of the Brahmi script alongside Kharoshthi suggests that the site dated later than Niya, most likely to sometime after 400 CE. There Buddhist devotees walked around covered circular stupas, whose central pillar contained relics of the Buddha and whose walls portrayed different Buddhist scenes. The roofs of these round buildings had collapsed, so Stein and his men had to remove the sand to reach the original passageway where worshippers left offerings so long ago.

  In one ruin, Miran 3 (M3), they uncovered a cloth landscape, illustrated with flowers of silk and cotton sewn onto a background (possibly by individual believers), and also scraps of cloth with Kharoshthi script on them
, praying for the continued health of the donors’ relatives. The wall paintings Stein found were particularly striking; on the lower edge of wall, below waist level, were paintings of sixteen winged figures, with distinctly Western-looking faces (shown in color plate 5B). The paintings above them survived only partially, but Stein was able to make out a Buddha and his disciples. The paintings formed a narrative depicting different scenes from the Buddha’s life. Such narratives came from a later period than the individual portraits of the Buddha found at Niya.

  Another building some 200 feet (60 m) away was, like M3, a round covered stupa with a painted corridor around it. More of the paintings survived at M5 than at M3, allowing Stein to identify a scene from the life of the Buddha, who appears while still a young prince riding a horse and leaving his father’s palace. The artist signed his name “Tita” in Kharoshthi script and recorded the amount he had been paid. Stein, always quick to detect Western influence, concluded that Tita was the localized name of a Roman painter originally named Titus; even if the artist was really a Central Asian with a foreign name, the iconography of the painting, particularly the lower band showing cherubs among undulating wreaths, uses motifs borrowed from Roman art, perhaps brought by artists who came from the eastern edge of the Roman Empire in Syria or copied from sketchbooks.

  The Kroraina Kingdom’s residents continued to live in the harsh conditions of the desert kingdom until sometime in the fifth century. Surviving documents do not explain why the residents abandoned the sites of Loulan, Miran, and Niya. While some sites along the southern Silk Road, like Keriya, show clear signs of environmental degradation at the time they were abandoned, at Niya archeologists have found healthy petrified trees, some large enough to cut down for timber, dating to the third and fourth centuries.99