www.bl.uk/silkroad This new exhibition (7 May – 21 September ) at the *British Library provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view priceless and rarely seen Silk Road treasures from Sir Aurel Stein’s collection
– considered one of the richest in the world – and to learn of the lives of the people who lived 1,000 years ago along the Silk Road.
The Silk Road is often talked of as a single route stretching east to west - from China to the Mediterranean. In fact the Silk Road is a simple name for a complex network. In its heyday, towns along it were open to influences from all the major world civilisations at the time, especially India to the south and the Turks to the north.
The Hungarian-born explorer Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1942) fought rivals at the turn of the last century to be the first to uncover these long-lost civilisations. The evidence had lain buried for up to 2,000 years in tombs, tips and temples beneath the sands of eastern Central Asia.
In 1907 Stein entered a walled-up cave near Dunhuang ('the blazing beacon') in north-west China, finding thousands of manuscripts and a few printed items. One of them, the Diamond Sutra, is the earliest printed book to bear a date (11 May, 868). It is now one of the greatest treasures in the British Library.
Considering the many different peoples who lived and travelled the length of the Silk Road, it is hardly surprising that written materials have survived in a large variety of languages and scripts.
Apart from Chinese, the main scripts used in Central Asia are either derived from Aramaic, the administrative script used throughout the Achaemenid empire (c.550-330 BC), or are different forms of the Indian Brahmi script.
The Sogdians, the Uighur Turks and the Mongolians all used an adaptation of Aramaic. Other Aramaic scripts in use were the Syriac script used by the Nestorian Christians, the Manichaean script introduced by the prophet Mani himself, used for Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian and Turkic Manichaean texts.
The Turks also developed a special Runic script possibly as a deliberate reaction against the more usual Uighur script. There are two solitary examples of Persian in Pahlavi script, and one example of Judaeo-Persian (Persian in Hebrew letters) dating from the eighth century. With the advent of Islam in Central Asia, the Perso-Arabic script became widespread.
The Kharosthi script, used for the Middle Indian language Gandhari, also owes its origin to Aramaic. Unlike other Indian languages, it was written from right to left. The earliest examples, written on birch-bark, probably date from the first century AD. In the third and fourth centuries we find many examples written on wood and leather from the kingdom of Kroraina.
Brahmi script was used for writing Sanskrit, Prakrit, Tocharian and Khotanese texts. The Tibetan script was a development of Brahmi. Brahmi was occasionally adapted for other non-Indo-Aryan languages such as Sogdian, Tocharian, Turkish and Mongolian and Chinese.
· The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London WC1 |