1^98.] Annual Address. 63 



and Professor S. von Oldenburg. In their opinion the manuscript 

 could not be of much later date than the Christian era, and might, 

 possibly, be even older. 



It is thus curious that what is probably the oldest Indian manu- 

 script should have been obtained outside India, in Central Asia. Yet after 

 all, it is perhaps notliing more than might have been expected. Indian 

 civilization and Indian literature was carried by the Buddhist pro- 

 paganda into Central Asia as early as the commencement of our era» 

 Their settlements extended as far as Khotan, Kuchar and the borders 

 of China proper. What was thus carried out of India stood a very good 

 chance of being preserved by the dry climate and soil of the Central 

 Asian deserts, the wonderfully conserving power of which seems to be 

 as great as that of Egypt. Indeed, to judge from the abundant yields 

 of recent explorations. Central Asia promises to be as fruitful a mine 

 of epigraphicai discoveries as Egypt has proved to be. In Central 

 Asia nothing seems to decay but what is destroyed by the ignorance 

 or the malice of men. 



It is to Central Asia that we also owe our oldest manuscript in the 

 Brahmi alphabet. This is the well-known Bower Manuscript, the date- 

 of which cannot be later than 450 A.D., and may be much earlier. 

 My edition of the text of this manuscript, entrusted to me by the 

 Government of India, was completed last year. 'An introduction, 

 narrating its history and discussing its age, contents, etc., is now 

 under preparation. Its history, which is not without interest on 

 account of its connection with other important discoveries, those of the 

 Weber and Macartney Manuscripts, I will briefly relate. The Bower 

 Manuscript is called after Captain Bower, who, on his tour of Central 

 Asian exploration, in 1890, obtained it in Kuchar from a Turki visitor. 

 The latter also showed him the place where the manuscript had been dug 

 out. It was the site of an ancient Buddhist vihara or monastery, partly 

 consisting of cells cut in the rock of a neighbouring hill. In connec- 

 tion with this vihara there were also the ruins of an ancient stupa, 

 from the relic chamber of which the manuscript had been dug out 

 precisely in the same way, as the scraps of inscribed birch-bark and 

 other relics had been obtained by Mr. Masson in 1834 from the old 

 Topes of Afghanistan. 



From information received by me later on from Mr. Macartney, the 

 British Political Agent in Kashghar, it appears that at some time in 

 1^89 a Turki merchant of Kuchar (probably Captain Bower's visitor), 

 in conjunction with a friend of hie named Dildar Khan, an Afghan mer- 

 chant of Yarkand, undertook, secretly for fear of the Chinese autho- 

 rities, to excavate the stupa in question. Their object in digging into 



