Place · oasis city & manuscript site · China
Turfan & Gaochang
A depression below sea level on the northern route, watered by underground karez channels, whose dry ruins at Gaochang and Bezeklik have yielded manuscripts in more than twenty languages and scripts — Sanskrit, Tokharian, Sogdian, Uyghur, Chinese, Syriac and Middle Persian among them.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 42.850, 89.530
Worth knowing
The Tokharian languages, known only from Turfan and Kucha manuscripts, are Indo-European and closer to Latin and Celtic than to Sanskrit, in the middle of Asia. Their discovery in 1908 forced a rewriting of Indo-European linguistics.
Connections (3)
- Site adjacencyDunhuang, China
Turfan and Dunhuang are the two great manuscript finds of the Tarim, about a thousand kilometres apart, and between them they preserved the documents of a whole multilingual Buddhist world — Sanskrit, Tokharian, Sogdian, Uyghur, Chinese, Syriac and Middle Persian at Turfan, and the sealed library cave at Dunhuang with its fifty thousand rolls. Both were carried off in quantity by European expeditions between 1900 and 1914.
- Script continuity withPānini
Sanskrit grammatical texts in the Paninian tradition turn up among the Turfan manuscripts, copied for monks who needed to read Buddhist Sanskrit at the edge of the Gobi — the same discipline, taught from the same sutras, three thousand kilometres from where Panini worked at Shalatula. Alongside them are the Tokharian texts, in an Indo-European language closer to Latin than to Sanskrit, in the middle of Asia.
- Trade routeKucha & the Kizil caves
Gaochang at Turfan and Kucha were the two great Buddhist kingdoms of the northern Tarim rim, and Xuanzang's account of them is the fullest there is. The king of Gaochang's letters of introduction, silk and thirty horses are what carried him across the Tian Shan; the Kizil paintings at Kucha are what the Buddhism he describes actually looked like on a wall.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Turpan”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.
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