This document records the sale of a camel for 8,000 Chinese coins by a Khotanese man to a Sogdian named Vagiti Vadhaga. (The word suliga, used to describe Vagiti Vadhaga, originally meant “Sogdian” but later took on the broader meaning of “merchant.”)
The use of the Khotanese king’s reign year to date the contract suggests that it was drawn up in Khotan and carried to Endere. Scholars of the Khotanese language observe that all the names in the contract—the king’s, the seller’s, the purchaser’s, the scribe’s—all take Iranian forms. “King of kings” is the standard Iranian term for ruler, and “hinaza” is an Iranian word meaning “general.” Thus, a single wooden slip—another of Stein’s chance finds—documents the use of an Iranian language in Khotan in the third or fourth centuries, at the same time that the residents of neighboring Niya were speaking the Indic language of Gandhari.
The first documents in the Khotanese language surfaced on the antiquities market in 1895. A British captain named S. H. Godfrey bought them from some local merchants, who claimed that they had been found in Kucha, and sent them to Augustus Frederick Rudolf Hoernle, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, who had deciphered the Bower Manuscript, the first major manuscript find in Xinjiang. In the following years, the British consul based in Kashgar, George Macartney, bought more documents and asked Hoernle to decipher them as well.16 In 1899 Hoernle left India and retired to Oxford; continuing the practice of his predecessors, Stein sent him all manuscripts written in Brahmi script, which replaced Kharoshthi after it fell from use about 400 CE.17
As early as 1901 Hoernle realized that some of the manuscripts, though written in Brahmi script, were in a language distinct from Sanskrit: “Only a few of the words or phrases have, as yet, been determined, but these seem to prove clearly that the language of the documents is an Indo-Iranian dialect, having affinities both with Persian and the Indian vernaculars, in addition to peculiarities of its own which connect it with the dialects of the Western Highlands of Central Asia.”18 Initially Hoernle did not know if Khotanese was an Iranian language that borrowed a huge vocabulary from Sanskrit or a Sanskritic language with many Iranian words. A linguist encountering English would confront a similar problem: English might appear to be a Romance language with a large Germanic vocabulary, but it is actually a Germanic language that, after the Norman Conquest of 1066, absorbed many French words. By 1920 a scholarly consensus had formed: Khotanese was an Iranian language, contemporary with Middle Persian and Sogdian, with an extensive vocabulary borrowed from Sanskrit.
Because the script, spellings, and grammar of the different phases of Khotanese vary, Prods Oktor Skjærvø, the Aga Khan Professor of Iranian at Harvard, sees three distinct phases in the history of the language: Old Khotanese (fifth to sixth centuries), Middle Khotanese (seventh to eighth centuries), and Late Khotanese (ninth to tenth centuries). Each phase is associated with a specific group of manuscript finds: examples of Old Khotanese are almost exclusively translations of Buddhist texts of unknown provenance; the Middle Khotanese texts surfaced at Dandan Uiliq; and the Late Khotanese texts came from cave 17 at Dunhuang.19
Only one manuscript in Old Khotanese is not a translation of a Buddhist text from Sanskrit: The Book of Zambasta.20 The text is named for the official who commissioned it: at several places, the text states, “The official Ysambasta with his son Ysarkula ordered this to be written.” (The English letter z best approximates the sound of the combined y and s.) This, the most important work of literature in Khotanese, is an anthology of Buddhist writings. The text’s author is modest: as he explains, “Since I have translated this into Khotanese, however extremely small and poor my knowledge, I seek pardon from all the deva [divine] buddhas for whatever meaning I have distorted here. But whatever merits I may have obtained here, may I surely through these merits realize bodhi together with all beings also.” Bodhi, the knowledge and understanding of Buddhist teachings that comes with enlightenment, is a key teaching of the text, as is emptiness.
The Book of Zambasta covers familiar ground for all students of Buddhism. One chapter on the topic of women’s wiles and how the listener can best withstand them stands out, since few Buddhist anthologies include such a discussion.21The chapter warns, “Those women’s cunning arts they learn without a teacher,” and concludes, “The official Ysambasta with all his sons [and] daughters,”—this is the only mention of Zambasta’s daughters—“ordered [me] to write [this]. May I surely become a Buddha.” The author adds a final comment: “The Acarya [“teacher,” a term of address for monks] Siddhabhadra read this section on women many times for the restraining of his mind: ‘Thus indeed I remained as agitated as the ocean when I had read this sutra. Then in fact there was no lying quiet for me, like the eyelashes, the hairs between the eyebrows, the hairs on the cheeks.’” This confession comes as a rare human note in what is often a dry anthology.
Proceeding chapter by chapter, The Book of Zambasta paraphrases certain Buddhist narratives, many associated with Mahayana teachings. It relates the tale of how the Buddha outsmarted the heretic magician Bhadra, who used his magic to transform a cemetery into a “palace of the gods.” One chapter recounts the Buddha’s biography and his enlightenment, while another narrates the Buddha’s departure and his entrusting of this world to the Maitreya Buddha. The chapter about the Maitreya has the same content as the text that was translated from “twghry” into Uighur, which underpinned Sieg and Siegling’s identification of the Tocharian language. The Book of Zambasta beautifully illustrates Khotan’s place as a central node for monks traveling among all the countries of the region, because it anthologizes and paraphrases texts from Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, and Uighur, among other languages.22
The Book of Zambasta does not survive in its entirety. Two hundred and seven leaves of an original 298 are held in libraries in Calcutta, St. Petersburg, London, New Haven, Munich, and Kyoto. The Russian consul Nikolai Petrovsky purchased 192 leaves from locals in Kashgar, so no one knows the book’s original findspot.23 Scholars have identified five different manuscripts from which these leaves were drawn, the earliest dating to between 450 and 500.24
At the time that The Book of Zambasta was written, Khotan was an independent kingdom. In the early 600s it became a vassal of the Western Turks, and it was still part of their confederation when Xuanzang visited on his way to India in 630. In the following two decades, the Tang emperor Taizong (reigned 626–49) wrested control of Central Asia from the Western Turks; Tang forces took Turfan in 640 and Kucha in 648. In that year, the king of Khotan shifted allegiance. He sent one son and three hundred camels to aid the Tang army, visited the capital, and left his sons in the Tang capital as hostages. (It was common practice for future rulers to be raised in the capitals of their country’s allies so that they could learn their customs.) Khotan became one of the Four Garrisons where the Tang stationed troops in the far west; the other three were Kucha, Kashgar, and Yanqi (between 679 and 719 Tokmak took Yanqi’s place).
After 648 Khotan’s history was entwined with Kucha’s: the Tibetans conquered both oases and ruled them from 670 to 692, when the Chinese regained control, which they retained until 755. Then the An Lushan rebellion prompted them to withdraw their forces from Central Asia.25 The height of Silk Road contact for Khotan, like Turfan and Kucha, occurred during the seventh and eighth centuries, when the Tang military presence was strongest.
The largest cache of Khotanese-language documents comes from the site of Dandan Uiliq, 80 miles (130 km) northeast of Khotan. Hedin had visited the site in January 1896 on his second trip into the Taklamakan (on the disastrous first foray two of his men had died); a newspaper clipping about the lost city in the desert inspired Stein to apply to the Government of India for funding.26 Before setting off into the desert in 1900, Stein enlisted the help of Macartney, the British consul in Kashgar, and Petrovsky, the Russian consul, to question the men who had sold them small artifacts and excavated manuscripts. Two of the vendors recommended that Stein con
tact a Uighur named Turdi, who, as Stein explained, “found his bearings even where the dead uniformity of the sand dunes would to ordinary eyes seem to offer no possible landmark.”27 When the hired guides could not locate Dandan Uiliq, Turdi led Stein’s party to the ruins.
At Dandan Uiliq, Stein mapped fifteen structures in small clusters in the desert. The smallest structure measured 5 feet (1.5 m) square, the largest, 23 feet (7 m) by 20 feet (6 m). Some of the structures appeared to be dwellings, and documents found inside indicated that they were the residences of officials, who kept records in both Chinese and Khotanese.
One ruin held multiple leaves from Buddhist texts, evidence of a library at the site. Other structures were clearly religious; housing stucco sculptures, they had frescoes on their walls, many of which depicted deities. Some buildings also contained wooden panels buried in the ground.
Dandan Uiliq was sufficiently remote that most of the finds that were sold at the market must have been, Stein concluded, the product of short trips by a few individuals working alone or in small groups.28 Stein was wrong about the inaccessibility of Dandan Uiliq. Yes, the site was in the middle of the Taklamakan Desert and not easy to find, but those with sufficient determination could get there. The American geographer Ellsworth Huntington came in 1905, and the German traveler Emil Trinkler and his Swiss companion Walter Bosshard followed in the 1920s. In 1998 Christoph Baumer, a Swiss traveler, journeyed by camel train to the site, where—to the dismay of the archeological authorities—he uncovered several new paintings in an unauthorized dig.29 Modern technology, in the form of the Global Positioning System and off-road vehicles, has made it even easier for looters to reach Dandan Uiliq in recent years.
HOW THE SECRET OF SILKMAKING LEFT CHINA
Stein’s most famous find from Dandan Uiliq was this painted wooden panel measuring 18 inches (46 cm) long by 4 5/8 inches (12 cm) high, which a devotee left as an offering to the Buddha. A woman points to the crown of a princess who, according to legend, smuggled a silkworm cocoon out of China, thus revealing the secret of silkmaking to the peoples living in the Western Regions. In truth, the know-how for raising silkworms and spinning silk left China the same way that papermaking did, carried by people migrating along the Silk Road.
Since 1998 many Khotanese-language documents and objects with no clear provenance—but most likely from Dandan Uiliq or nearby—have surfaced on the antiquities market. Modern Chinese museums and universities face exactly the same thorny dilemma that curators of Western museums do: should they purchase the looted goods and preserve them for scholars to analyze? Or should they refuse to buy them in the hope that doing so will persuade looters to stop raiding ancient sites? If they do not buy them, the manuscripts will be lost; if they do, the unauthorized excavations will continue and quite possibly escalate.
In 2004, the National Library of China in Beijing decided to purchase some documents from Dandan Uiliq. Experts in Khotanese have worked intensively to date these documents, to decipher and translate them, to provide them with a provenance (sometimes possible because they mention some of the same individuals who appear in documents whose findspot is known), and—most important of all—to explain their significance. These new finds have changed our understanding of key developments in Silk Road history.
The earliest documents from the Dandan Uiliq region date to 722.30 Found at a small settlement south of Dandan Uiliq called Domoko (Damagou in Chinese), these wooden tallies measure an inch (2.5 cm) or less across and range from 7.5 inches (19 cm) to 18 inches (46 cm) long. With a round hole at one end where they were attached to a container holding grain, they have evenly spaced notches that officials marked with ink each time they received a payment of tax grain. Here is a typical example:
[Chinese text]: Boluodaocai of Bajia delivered 7 shuos [roughly 1.2 bushels, or 42 L] of wheat on the 5th day of the 8th month of the 10th year of Kaiyuan [722]. Clerk: He Xian. Officials: Zhang Bing, Xiang Hui.
[Khotanese text]: Bradaysaa of Birgamdara delivered 7 kusas of wheat in the year of the shau Marsha.31
Both the Chinese and the Khotanese give the name of the taxpayer, the amount of grain paid, and the year of payment (722). The Chinese text gives more information, including the exact day and month of the tax payment as well as the name of the receiving clerk and his superiors. The tallies mention three types of tax grain: barley, wheat, and millet.32 All the tallies (there are thirty-five in the set bought by the National Library of China; others are in private hands) follow this same format.
These tallies afford a clear glimpse of how Tang-dynasty tax collection system functioned in Khotan. These documents are all bilingual. Living in the modern era, we have grown accustomed to multilingual documents of the European Community and other international organizations. There is something extraordinary, though, in seeing these bilingual grain tallies. In the eighth century, the reach of the Chinese state extended down to the lowest level; even the smallest payment of grain was recorded in Khotanese, the language of the local people, and in Chinese, the language of the rulers. Similarly, all the officials in the government had both Chinese and Khotanese titles. The Khotanese bureaucracy employed clerks who could translate Khotanese documents into Chinese; some Chinese-language documents refer to petitions in Khotanese from the local people that were translated so that Chinese officials could understand them.33
A different group of wooden documents, only in Khotanese and most likely contemporary with the grain tallies, reveals more about local society. Shaped like a box and made from two pieces of wood, an undertablet holds a cover tablet that, like a drawer, can be pulled in and out with a knob. Writing covers almost every surface, including the interior, sides, and exterior of the two pieces of the box. These pieces record contractual agreements among different residents.34
These documents refer to an “assembly” that enforces decisions reached by officials, a distinctive feature of Khotanese society. One dispute involved payment for the use of water for irrigation; the officials hearing the case stipulated that one man should temporarily receive the water, which belonged to the village collectively, and that the village should retain the right of future use. The decision ends with the phrase “This case was presented in the judicial assembly before” two officials, whose names are given.35
This case shows that, by the early eighth century and quite possibly earlier, the Khotanese had developed a sophisticated legal system in which individuals recorded transactions such as the transfer of irrigation rights, a loan, or the adoption of a child. Witnesses vouched for the details of these transactions, and officials signed the documents—customarily before an assembly—to ensure that they were maintained. Once a decision had been reached, everyone in the community was supposed to abide by it. Whole villages bore some collective tax responsibilities; when a village had paid the required tax, officials issued a receipt—but only for payment in full.
This system was in place in 755, when the An Lushan rebellion erupted in central China. In the following year, the Khotanese king sent five thousand troops, many of them Chinese soldiers garrisoned at Khotan, to help the Tang emperor suppress the rebels. After 755, the Chinese retained only tenuous control of Khotan. Power rested in the hands of the local commissioner, a Chinese official, who often could not get messages to his superiors in the Chinese capital because overland travel was so difficult.
During the decades after 755, as elsewhere in northwest China, the Chinese state stopped paying military units stationed in the northwest; Dunhuang experienced a coin shortage at this time. Even before 755 Chinese coins may not always have been available in Khotan; in one instance, adoptive parents paid five hundred coins for a child and substituted white silk for the remaining two hundred coins they owed, presumably because coins were already in short supply.36
Some Chinese-language documents from Dandan Uiliq, which date to the 780s, record loans for over ten thousand coins.37 We cannot tell if coins were actually paid or were simply used as a unit of record while l
ocal people substituted cloth or grain as payment. In one bilingual contract, the Chinese text mentions payment in coins, while the Khotanese version specifies how much cloth was paid as a substitute for coins.38 By the end of the eighth century, a subsistence economy in which textiles and grain in measured amounts served as money replaced the coin economy of earlier times.
The Chinese forces continued to collect taxes from the Khotanese populace, as shown by a document requisitioning sheepskins for the soldiers’ winter clothing. This document, like others found in a single cache at Dandan Uiliq, was addressed to a local official named Sidaka who served as spata, the village head in charge of nonmilitary matters. The author of the document, himself also a spata officeholder, explains that, since the people in Sidaka’s hamlet own 90 sheep, they owe 28 sheepskins; the tax rate is 2 sheepskins for every 6.5 sheep owned, or 27.69 for the hamlet. Sidaka submitted 27 sheepskins, but his colleague explains that no receipt will be issued until the hamlet pays the full amount due. Such a document presupposes the existence of detailed household registers listing not only the human occupants of the village but also the animals they owned; without such records—some of which have been found—the occupying Chinese government could not have known how many sheepskins to levy from the village.
The Silk Road: A New History Page 26