The Silk Road: A New History (9 page)

YINGPAN BURIAL
Interred in a painted wooden coffin, the deceased wore a white mask, made of layers of hemp glued together, with a rectangle of gold foil on the forehead above the eyes. He was buried with two miniature sets of clothing (for use in the afterworld?): one at his left wrist, the other on his stomach. Grave M15, excavated 1995. Courtesy of Wang Binghua.

Whether or not the deceased in Niya tomb M3 or the Yingpan tomb were actually local kings (still the most likely possibility), they certainly were among the wealthiest people living at these settlements, and their tombs offer a vivid picture of the local economy. The region’s inhabitants buried the dead with grains such as millet, barley, and wheat, and fruits grown in orchards like grapes, pears, peaches, pomegranates, and dates. They viewed a whole leg of lamb as the ultimate treat, the centerpiece of a feast in the next life, and garments made from imported textiles as the most suitable clothing for that life.

Most analysts concur that the material evidence from the Niya, Yingpan, and Loulan sites dates to somewhere between the second and fourth centuries but are not sure exactly when. In contrast, the written evidence from Loulan is clear: documents in both Chinese and Kharoshthi reveal that Chinese armies were stationed at Loulan in the late third and early fourth centuries
CE.

Most of the documents in Chinese from Loulan date to 263 to 272, with a few remaining examples from 330.
⁴⁹
This was the time when the Shanshan Kingdom ruled the region from Niya to Loulan and when the different Chinese dynasties based in north China who succeeded the Han dynasty, primarily the Wei (220–65) and the Western Jin (265–316), stationed garrisons in Loulan. Loulan produced about fifty Kharoshthi-script documents, but over seven hundred Chinese documents, either short texts (usually no more than ten characters) on wood slips or on tiny scraps of paper.
⁵⁰
The Chinese often recorded private transactions on paper, while garrison officials tended to use wooden slips for their records, an indication that private individuals used paper before government officials did.
⁵¹

Like their Han-dynasty predecessors, the Loulan garrison belonged to the Chinese system of military colonies whose inhabitants were expected to grow their own food while they stood ready to serve in the army. The soldiers in Chinese employ used draft animals, like cows and horses, to plow the land on which they raised wheat, barley, and millet. They were not necessarily Chinese; the Chinese military recruited from among the local people as well. The farmer-soldiers also introduced agricultural techniques, most notably irrigation for watering crops. They experimented with cattle-drawn ploughs, and they used new types of iron spade and sickle, the first metal tools employed in the region.
⁵²

Chinese government regulations stipulated that each soldier was entitled to 1 peck (
dou
) 2 pints (
sheng
) (approximately 2.6 quarts [2.4 L]) of grain each day—but local officials could not always provide the stipulated amount, and the rations sometimes dipped as low as half that.
⁵³
When the grain grown by the farmer-soldiers ran short, Chinese officials, surviving documents reveal, bought extra grain from the local people using coins and colored silk. The Loulan garrison received funds, in both coin and silk, from military units based to the east in the city of Dunhuang or possibly Wuwei, both in Gansu. The silk came in various colors and in two lengths, long and short. One bolt of plain tabby silk found by Stein at Loulan in 1901, shown in color plate 5A, is the only surviving example of silk used as money from such an early period.
⁵⁴

Many documents give the exchange rates for conversions among three different types of currency: coins, colored silk, and grain. Officials used silk to buy grain and horses for their men, and the soldiers themselves also exchanged silk and grain for shoes and clothing. They regularly converted prices from one currency to another.
⁵⁵

The Loulan documents mention a few much larger transactions as well. One wood slip, dated 330, reports that the Sogdians, traders originally from the Samarkand region, presented ten thousand piculs (each picul was approximately 1/2 bushel, or 20 L) of something (the word is missing), most likely of grain, and two hundred coins (
qian
) to the authorities.
⁵⁶
Although the back of the slip has the seals of two Chinese officials, the document does not explain why the Sogdians made these payments. This was either a tax payment or one of an ongoing series of transactions to provide the Chinese troops with food. Another fragment records a large payment of 319 animals in exchange for 4,326 bolts of colored silk.
⁵⁷
This, too, appears to be a payment by Sogdian merchants to the Chinese authorities, and we know from fragments of two Sogdian-language documents found by Stein that Sogdians were active at Loulan at this time.
⁵⁸
In later centuries, Sogdians played a key role in supplying Chinese armies, and it is quite likely they had already begun to do so in the early fourth century
CE
at Loulan.

The Chinese documents found by Stein and Hedin at Loulan come from only a few spots.
⁵⁹
Still, they give the overwhelming impression that the transactions at Loulan exclusively involved the garrison collectively or soldiers individually, using grain, silk, and coins to obtain grain, horses, clothing, and shoes from the local people. In sum, the indigenous subsistence economy occasionally supplied the Chinese garrison with locally produced commodities. As Ito Toshio, who teaches at Osaka Kyoiku University, has concluded after a thorough survey, the documents do not mention any profit-seeking activities.
⁶⁰
The only evidence of merchants—and it is highly fragmentary—indicates Sogdian merchants who worked for the military authorities.

The Kharoshthi-script documents from Niya and Loulan are much richer than the Chinese-language documents. They portray a broader range of society, from the lowliest cultivators to the ruler himself, involved in a host of activities, some utterly mundane. Accordingly, they make it possible to glimpse life along the Silk Road in a way that the Chinese documents do not.

Some of the Kharoshthi documents give the name of the current king, the year of his reign, and occasionally the name of his predecessor or successor. In 1920, using such clues, Rapson and his collaborators drew up a list of five kings who ruled for a total of some ninety years. Yet no one knew exactly when those local kings had ruled. In 1940 Thomas Burrow produced a comprehensive translation of all those Kharoshthi documents whose meaning could be understood, but they still remained undated.

Then, in 1965, John Brough announced that he had found the key to dating the Kharoshthi documents: the Chinese title
shizhong,
literally meaning “palace attendant,” corresponded to the term
jitumgha.
In 263, the Kroraina king Amgoka used the new title for the first time. He may have received it from the ruler of the Western Jin dynasty (265–316), a regional Chinese dynasty based in Luoyang city, Henan Province, but this was two years before the Western Jin decisively defeated the dynasties that preceded it. The forms of address for the rulers also changed: before the seventeenth year of Amgoka’s reign, letter writers used long strings of titles for kings; after that year, the titles became noticeably shorter and include the word
jitumgha.
⁶¹

The year 263 was the seventeenth of King Amgoka’s reign. Once this single year was fixed, it was simply a matter of assigning calendar years to all the kings’ reigns. Brough’s original chronology has since been extended slightly because of the subsequent discovery of Kharoshthi documents naming other kings.
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Not everyone accepts Brough’s dating, but there is general agreement that the Kharoshthi documents date from the mid-third to the mid-fourth century, give or take twenty years. This period overlaps with the Chinese documents from Loulan, which date to 263–330. And because the Kharoshthi documents refer to no specific external event, there is little chance of dating them more precisely.

Since the local inhabitants lacked their own written language, the Kharoshthi script served to record people’s names, very strange-sounding names indeed. The approximately one thousand proper names and 150 loanwords that appear in the Kharoshthi documents indicate that the local language of Niya was not Chinese and totally unlike the language spoken by the refugees from Gandhara. Writing in 1935, Thomas Burrow suggested that the indigenous Niya language was related to Tocharian, an Indo-European language spoken on the northern route, but his suggestion has not been widely accepted, nor has it prompted further study.
⁶³
It appears that, before the arrival of the immigrants, the indigenous peoples had their own language but no means of writing it, which is why they adopted the Kharoshthi script.

While rulers tend to have names of local origin like Ly’ipeya, many scribes have names of Sanskritic origin like Buddhasena, meaning “The one whose lord is the Buddha.” As we often see today, names are not always a reliable indicator of someone’s ethnic background; immigrant parents do sometimes draw the names of their children from the culture of their new home. Yet often the only identifying trace that survives of a given individual living along the Silk Routes is his or her name.

In reconstructing the migration of the technologically more sophisticated Gandharans to Niya, one might expect the migrants to overthrow the local rulers and found their own states. Interestingly, the names of the rulers and the scribes indicate that, while many scribes were Gandharan, the rulers continued to be local men. The scenario of refugees from north India, migrating in groups of no more than a hundred at a time, seems likely.

The Kharoshthi documents do not record what happened when the first migrants from India arrived. A later ruler instructed local officials to receive refugees, “who are to be looked after as if they were your own.” He also stipulated that the refugees be given land, houses, and seeds “so that they can make copious and plentiful cultivation.”
⁶⁴
Not all refugees fared so well; some were assigned to work as slaves for the residents. The later treatment of migrants is important because it suggests how the migrants from Gandhara may have been treated on their arrival.

The refugees taught the indigenous peoples how to write their script and to store their documents in archives, the first of which Stein and a man named Rustam, whom Stein called “the most experienced and most reliable of my old diggers of 1901,” discovered in 1906. The two men returned to room 8 of house 24, because, as Stein explained:

Already during the first clearing I had noticed a large lump of clay or plaster near the wall where the packets of tablets lay closest. I had ordered it to be left undisturbed, though I thought little of its having come to that place by more than accident. Rustam had just extracted between it and the wall a well-preserved double-wedge tablet, when I saw him eagerly burrow with his hands into the floor just as when my fox terrier “Dash” was at work opening rat holes. Before I could put any questions I saw Rustam triumphantly draw forth from about six inches [15 cm] below the floor a complete rectangular document with its double clay seal intact and its envelope still unopened. When the hole was enlarged we saw that the space toward the wall and below its foundation beam was full of closely packed layers of similar documents. It was clear that we had struck a small hidden archive.
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The marking of the site with a lump of clay or plaster, Stein felt, showed that the original owner had been obliged to leave the village in a hurry, but with the intent to return.

This single find produced nearly eighty documents, of which twenty-six were “double rectangular tablets” with their seals intact.
⁶⁶
Stein used this term for a specific type of document: like a shallow drawer, the upper piece of wood slotted into the bottom rectangular piece of wood, and the two pieces of wood were tied together with string and sealed.

Local officials archived these documents and retrieved them when needed. In one instance, a monk sold a plot of land to a man named Ramshotsa for three horses; twenty years later, when someone encroached on Ramshotsa’s land, officials consulted the earlier rectangular tablet before deciding that the land indeed belonged to Ramshotsa.
⁶⁷
In all, over two hundred double rectangular tablets were excavated at Niya, most ending with a statement of the penalty to be charged should either party challenge the terms of the exchange, and a variation of the assertion that the document’s “authority is a thousand years, as long as life.”
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