70 Annual Address [Feb. 



Altogether'Central Asia seems to be a country likely to be pregnant 

 with archseological surprises, and it is satisfactory to know that Great 

 Britain will not be behind other countries in securing a fair share of them. 



In connection with the Central Asian manuscripts of which I have 

 been speaking, I must mention a very important discovery which baa 

 been recently made by Major H. A. Deane. In 1894 he first dis- 

 covered a number of inscriptions in an unknown script, incised more or 

 less carefully and distinctly on detached pieces of stone. In the follow^ 

 ing years he collected further large numbers of inscriptions of the 

 same kind They have all been found on the northern border of the 

 Peshawar District and in the independent territory beyond it, in the 

 countries, therefore, which anciently were called Gandhara and Udyana. 

 Some of them have been published by Mr. E. Senart in the Journal of 

 the French Asiatic Society, and the rest by Dr. A. Stein, in our Journal.si 

 These two scholars have subjected them to a very careful and minute 

 examination, the result of which is that the characters used in them, 

 though probably closely related to one another, show distinct signs of 

 being distributable into five different varieties.^* But neither of those 

 scholars, nor indeed anyone else hitherto, has been able to discover a key 

 to reading them. There is, however, some ground for believing that ulti- 

 mately they will be found to be written in some species of Turki script 

 and language. For some Turki inscriptions found on the banks of the 

 river Orkhon in Mongolia and deciphered by Professor V. Thompson in 

 1893, have been compared by Hofrath Prof. Biihler with Major Deane's 

 inscriptions, and he has observed that more than a dozen letters seem 

 to be common to both. Further Professors Levi and Ohavannes of Paris 

 have shown from the Itinerary of the Chinese pilgrim Oukong that in the 

 middle of the eighth century A. D. the countries of Gandhara and Udyana 

 were united under a dynasty of Turkish nationality and language.^^ 

 Among my Central Asian manuscripts there are several which I suspect 

 may be written in a very early species of Turki. The characters are of 

 an unknown kind, but, as the result however of a mere cursory inspection, 

 I seem to have noticed resemblances to the characters occurring in Major 

 Deane's inscriptions. Here, therefore, there seems to present itself a 

 possibility of unravelling the puzzle of the inscriptions as well as the 

 manuscripts. 



51 See Journal Asiatique, Vol. IV, pp. 332 and 504. Also reprinted as Notes 

 d' Epigra'phie Indienne, No. V, 1895 ; and our Journal, Vol. LXVII, 1898. 



52 Three of them, identified by Mr. Senart, have been called by him the 

 Spankharra, Boner and Mahaban varieties. The other two have been discovered by 

 Dr. Stein who gives the name Nurizai to the fourth variety ; the fifth he does not 

 name. 



23 See Journal Asiatique, Vol. VI, p. 378, for 1895. 



