Abstract
This never-before-published document is a letter documenting a property dispute. In this essay, I transliterated, translated, and annotated the document. This document exhibits a special language phenomenon, where one can argue that it provides yet another piece of evidence of the sanskritization of the Gāndhārī language used in Kharoṣṭhī manuscripts from Niya. The keyword “kula” (family) appears in the document numerous times, and this can help us to understand the social structure in ancient Shanshan.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay is the interim result from the major research project granted by national social science fund of China “The Research and Translation of Non-Chinese Documents from the southern route of Xinjiang’s Silk Road” led by Professor Duan Qing (Project Number: 12&ZD179). The author is grateful for the assistance and instructions given by Professor Duan. Also, the author would like to express her gratitude to the staff, especially Mr. Li Da, of Xinjiang Region Museum for their kind assistance.
- 2.
Letters addressed to Kranaya and Lýipeya were found scattered throughout the settlements of the Niya ruins; for example, KI19 (N.i.), KI88 (N.iv), KI192(N.vi), KI243(N.xv), KI403(N.xvii), KI502(N.xxiii), etc., just list a few. KI is short for Kharoṣṭhī Inscriptions, discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in Chinese Turkestan (A. M. Boyer, E. J. Rapson, E. Senart and P. S. Noble. 1929. Oxford: Clarendon Press), similarly hereinafter.
- 3.
Pending publication.
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Jiang, Y. (2020). The Xinjiang Region Museum Collection—An Interpretation of a Kharoṣṭhī Letter. In: Li, X. (eds) Non-Han Literature Along the Silk Road. Silk Road Research Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9644-1_8
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