The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c12.2

c12.2

The painting reproduced in colours on the frontispiece to this volume comes from the ruins of Yâr-Khoto, at about ten kilometres to the west of Turfan. Discovered on the 13th of July 1905 in the course of the operations of the second German archæological mission in this region of Chinese Turkestan, it is at present deposited in the Royal Ethnographical Museum (Kgl. Museum für Völkerkunde) in Berlin, under no. T(urfan) II, Y, 69. In shape rectangular, it measures m. 0,35 by m. 0,50, and, according to all probability, was formerly framed in bands of woven material, like a Japanese kakemono. The sanctuary, which it had once adorned, was apparently one dedicated to Buddha : at least, the fairly numerous manuscripts found in its company retain, under the diversity of their Sogdian, Turkish or Chinese languages and scripts, the common characteristic of having a Buddhist purport : we should have to except only some Uïgur fragments, which would be Manichean. On the other hand, the final disintegration of the building, constructed of undressed bricks, could not be much later than the ninth century of our era. Only the extraordinary dryness of the climate explains how a thing so perishable should have succeeded in reaching us, beneath the thick accumulated débris of bricks and dust, in a state of preservation relatively so satisfactory. We are indebted to the kindness of Dr. A. von Le Coq and Dr. Bode, the Director-General of the Royal Museums in Berlin, for the opportunity of offering to the public a first acquaintance with this work, one of the most significant, in our opinion, which have issued from the recent excavations in Central Asia.