The Silk Road by Valerie Hansen EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Valerie Hansen
- Language: English
- Genre: History of India
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At the Crossroads of Central Asia
The Kingdom of Kroraina
In late January 1901, even before Aurel Stein arrived at the site of
Niya, his camel driver gave him two pieces of wood with writing on them.
Stein, to his “joyful surprise,” recognized the Kharoshthi script, which was
used to write Sanskrit and related vernacular Indian languages in the third
and fourth centuries CE.1 One of these two documents appears on this page
—part of a historic cache proving that the Silk Road played a paramount
role in transmitting languages, culture, and religion, which is why this book
begins with a chapter about the ancient lost city of Niya.
DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE
ON THE SILK ROAD
This wooden document represented an entirely new writing technology that
migrants from northern Afghanistan and Pakistan introduced around 200 CE
to the residents of northwest China, who had no writing system of their
own. Using two pieces of wood, they crafted a base (shown here) with a top
that slid over it like a drawer and protected the contents. These wooden
documents written in the Kharoshthi script of their homeland, which
include contracts, royal orders, letters, and rulings in legal disputes, make it
possible to reconstruct this early encounter of people from radically
different backgrounds. The upside-down label gives the date and name of
the site, Niya, where the wooden slip was found. Courtesy of the Board of
the British Library.
The wooden documents from the site and others nearby confirmed the
existence of a small oasis kingdom stretching 500 miles (800 km) along the
southern Silk Road route—all the way from the site of Niya to the salt lake
of Lop Nor in the east. The Kroraina Kingdom flourished from around 200
CE to 400 CE. The native inhabitants spoke a language that was never
written down and is totally lost (except for their names as recorded by
outsiders).
The only reason we know anything about these people is due to the
arrival of immigrants from across the mountains to the west—immigrants
who did have a writing system, Kharoshthi. They used this script to record
land deeds, disputes, official business, and thousands of other important
events. The Kharoshthi script is the key unlocking the history of the
Kroraina civilization and in particular the lost cities of Niya, where most
documents were found, and a site even deeper in the desert, Loulan, that
was the capital of Kroraina for part of the kingdom’s history.
Supplementing these documents are valuable Chinese texts dating from the
Han dynasty that shed light on the kingdom’s relations with early Chinese
dynasties.
The immigrants came from the Gandhara region of modern-day
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The script they had learned to write on wooden
documents is the first proof of sustained cultural exchanges on the Silk
Road in the late second century. These immigrants gave the kingdom its
name, Kroraina; the Chinese name for it was Shanshan. Around 200 CE, the
immigrants seem to have arrived in small waves of one hundred people or
less. Apparently, they assimilated and never attempted to conquer the local
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