The End of Eighth-Century Khotan in Its Texts

Abstract

At the conference in honor of Werner Sundermann’s 70th birthday in Berlin March 30-31, 2006, Yutaka Yoshida1 gave a presentation concerning the historical information in the trilingual Karabalgasun inscription (Runic Turkic, Chinese, Sogdian) in which he suggested that certain Khotanese documents reflect two incursions of Hunas, who could be the Uigurs, into northwest Xinjiang.2 By the first they conquered Kucha and by the second they ousted the Tibetans from Kashgar. According to Yoshida, Sogdian xwn and related words such as Skt. hūn a first denoted “Xiongnu,”3 but later may have come to refer to any nomadic people or ethnic group originating from Mongolia. As it happened, that same year, Zhang Zhan, a student of Professor Duan Qing’s at Peking University, was admitted to the program in Old Iranian studies at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard. His MA thesis had been an edition of a Judeo-Persian letter found in the area of Khotan, in which the writer reports the news from Kashgar (āgahī ī kāsgar īn hast): “the Tibetans (tupitiyān) have all been killed (pāk kostan ‘they killed them clean’), the bgdw has been captured (bastan).” Note that the Karabalagasun inscription appears to record the battle at Kucha in similar terms: tupetcānē aspāδ manxwāy “he smashed the Tibetan army.”4 The Judeo-Persian letter is undated, but is apparently from the same site as the one acquired by M. A. Stein at DandanUiliq and from the same time (ca. 800 CE), possibly also from the same archive.5 The letter must have been written after the fifth and sixth months (i.e., of 802), which are mentioned in it, and could therefore be approximately contemporary with Or.11344/7 and 17, which I shall argue are from 802 (see below). At the meeting of the 6th European Conference of Iranian Studies (under the aegis of the Societas Iranologica Europaea) held at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, 18-22 September 2007, Zhang Zhan presented the letter, his fellow student Bryan Averbuch presented the historical context of the letter, and I the Khotanese texts concerned with the events. As some of these texts and events are discussed in articles in this volume, I thought it might be useful to have all the texts handy in updated editions and translations.6 I also take the opportunity to comment on various related issues in three Appendices. The texts are from an archive containing letters from and to the spāta “General” Sudārrjuṃ (Sudārrjāṃ) and others to and from the magistrate (phars a) “Judge” Sāṃdara and others (see Appendix 3).7 Two of the letters refer to the hunas, and several of them are dated in the 32nd to 36th regnal years of an unnamed king. The king in question is likely to have been Viśa’ Vāhaṃ or Yuchi Yao , whose reign probably began in 767 (see Appendix 1). The dated letters are therefore presumably from 798-802, which fall into the reign of the 7th Uigur qaghan, 795-808.8 As for the ongoing discussion around the dates of King Viśa’ Vāhaṃ reflected in Hiroshi Kumamoto’s article in this volume, I await the verdict of the specialists (see Appendix 1). The letters are today in the British Library, London (Or., IOL Khot);9 the Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm (Hedin);10 and the Oriental Institute, St. Petersburg (Dx [= Dunhuang], SI M[alov], SI P[etrovsky]).11 The present-day whereabouts of the documents referred to as Domoko or Achma, discovered by Stein on his fourth Central Asian expedition (1930-1931), are unfortunately unknown, only photographs survive.12 The following editions and translations reflect the results of subsequent work in the field of Khotanese studies.13 The language of the letters is uniformly “Middle Khotanese,” differing from the “Late Khotanese” of the Dunhuang documents.14