The Silk Road: A New History (10 page)

EAST MEETS WEST ON A KHAROSHTHI DOCUMENT
This wooden document from Niya survives intact: the upper drawer has been slotted into the lower holder, and cords have been wrapped around both pieces of wood through notches and then sealed with clay. The seal on the left is in Chinese; that on the right shows a Western-looking face, most likely a Greek or Roman deity, which are often shown on Gandharan seals. These double rectangular tablets record the exchange between two parties of various types of property—slaves, livestock, and land—and give the names of the officials who recorded the transaction.

Suspecting that the different shapes of documents had distinct purposes, Stein proposed that a second type of document, “wedge-shaped tablets,” was for royal orders or policy decisions. He found nearly three hundred documents of this type. The wedge-shaped documents consisted of two pieces of wood of the same size, 7–15 inches (18–38 cm) long and 1.13–2.5 inches (3–6 cm) wide, that were placed face to face, tied together with string, and then sealed. The seals portrayed Greek gods like Athena, Eros, and Heracles, who were familiar to the migrants from the Gandhara region, who had worshipped them for centuries.
⁶⁹
The outside piece of wood gave the name of the recipient, and on the inside were the king’s orders, most of which followed the same opening formula:

To be given to the cozbo Tamjaka.

His majesty the king writes, he instructs the cozbo Tamjaka as follows:
⁷⁰

These official orders came from the king of Kroraina to the highest-ranking local official, or cozbo, the equivalent of governor.
⁷¹
Assisted by a group of lower officials, the cozbo heard and adjudicated local disputes.

This wedge-shaped tablet was addressed to Tamjaka, the cozbo of Cadh’ota, the name used in the Kharoshthi documents for the settlement at Niya. The king asked the cozbo to investigate a complaint from a resident of the town that soldiers from a neighboring district had stolen two of his cows. They had eaten one, he claimed, and returned the other. The royal orders often addressed intensely local concerns like this.

If the king had a more urgent order, he wrote it on leather. Only a few of this type of document survive. Other shapes of documents from Niya were used for private correspondence or for lists. The Japanese scholar Akamatsu Akihiko, who teaches Indic languages at Kyoto University, has suggested that the different types of Kharoshthi documents had their origins in the bureaucratic system of the Mauryan dynasty of northern India (ca. 320–185
BCE
) as recorded in the
Arthashastra
.
⁷²
This text, while it may be based on earlier texts, dates to the second to fourth centuries
CE.
⁷³
Attributed to Kautilya, the
Arthashastra
is a prescriptive text packed full of instructions about how to govern. Presuming that the ruler will issue written orders to his subordinates, it lists “the characteristics of a good edict” and “the defects” of bad edicts. It also gives the sources of law as dharma (a Sanskrit term usually understood as meaning correct conduct according to law or custom, but sometimes specifically indicating the teachings of the Buddha), evidence, custom, and royal edicts. Since the royal edicts are assumed to coincide with dharma, they take precedence over the other sources of law.

The
Arthashastra
lists nine types of royal edicts (some with subtypes) that do not correspond one-to-one with the Niya documents, but the overlap is noticeable. Many of the Kharoshthi documents from Niya, for example, seem to fit the category of “a conditional order,” which instruct the recipient, “If there is any truth to this report, then the following shall be done.”
⁷⁴
The resemblance is not surprising: people familiar with South Asian bureaucratic norms in the third and fourth centuries
CE
wrote both the
Arthashastra
and the Kharoshthi documents.

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?