É. Apor (ed.): Jubilee Volume of the Oriental Collection, 1951–1976. Papers Presented on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
J. HARMATTA: Sir Aurel Stein and the Date of the Sogdian "Ancient Letters"
86 ßr y maybe 2nd Sing. Pres, and Fut. Indicative, Imperfect or Optative and 3rd Sing. Optative respectively. sk : durative particle, Brys k may be "you are bringing". ' kt k: cf. B. Sogdian 'krt' к "done", sw = enclitic personal pronoun 3rd Sing. Acc. ' skny m: cf. B. Sogdian skn- "engrave", ' sk' n "sign, sculpture, image", Anc. Lett, sk' ' n k "note,record". This Sogdian letter, too, was obviously seized by the Chinese frontier guards at the second control post and perhaps used by them for some purpose of their own. Below the Sogdian text a Chinese character was written which can be read tentatively as ch'i. Unfortunately, this word has many meanings and without a context its sense here cannot be established reassuringly. If we assume the meaning "to permit; to trasport, to export" here, the character may represent a note made by the Chinese frontier guards at the occasion of the first control at the Jade Gate. It may have been inscribed, however, after the tablet was seized at the second control. To sum up, the archaeological finds of the Tun-huang Limes and first of all the Chinese documents among them unambigously prove that the Sogdian 'Ancient Letters' were written at the end of the Han Age, i.e. in the second half or towards the end of the Ilnd century A.D. This result harmonizes perfectly with the fact that the paper of the 'Ancient Letters' does not yet show any trace of the "sizing" with starch which already appears in a Chinese document from LouIan, dated 312 A.D. (No. 912, Inv. No. L. A. VI. II. 0230). [ 43] Finally, as I have shown elsewhere] 44] , the contents of Letter II reflect the events connected with the decline and fall of the Later Han Dynasty at the end of the Ilnd century A.D. Notes 1. Ct. their appreciation by W. B. HENNING. The Date of the Sogdian Ancient Letters: BSOAS 12 (1948) p. 602. 2. Sir Aurel STEIN, Serindia II, Oxford 1921. pp. 676, 752 . 3. Serindia II. p. 673. 4. H. REICHELT, Die soghdischen Handschriftenreste des Britischen Museums II, Heidelberg 1931. p. 6. 5. He wrote: "The Sogdian Letters were found together with a large number (about seven hundred) of Chinese documents" BSOAS 12 (1948) p. 602. 6. Haloun compiled his table on the basis of the table published by E. СНА VANNES (Les documents chinois découverts par Aurel Stein, Oxford 1913.Ш) of the dates occurring in the Chinese documents. He abridged, however, Chavannes' table arbitrarily by contracting the evidence into two totals and contrasting them with the two latest dates. This manipulation is inadmissible because one could contrast any year evidenced only by one document and separated by a chronological gap from the other years with the total of the other dates. As we show below, the majority of the dates is evidenced only by one document. Had Henning himself consulted
