Tokharian Elements in the Kharoṣṭhī Documents from Chinese Turkestan

Extract

The language of the Kharosthi documents recovered from Chinese Turkestan by Sir Aurel Stein is in the main Prakrit, but contains a considerable amount of non-Indian material. Of this there are a number of Iranian words (under a score). The rest consists of about 1,000 proper names and about 150 words. The latter consist of titles, names of agricultural products, articles of dress, etc., for which no doubt there was no Indian term that exactly corresponded. We may take this as representing the native language of the Shan-Shan kingdom, as opposed to the Indian Prakrit which was used as the official language. Most of the documents come from the Niya site, which was an outpost of the kingdom bordering on Khotan. For the rest there are a few from Endere (= Sāca) and about forty from the Lou Lan area (666–707). Since the names in these latter are of the same type and often the same names, we may conclude that the population and their language was uniform throughout the whole kingdom.