1899.] 
Section I.—Coins and Seals. 
15 
with them, as we know from the Bower and Weber Manuscripts to 
Kuchar, and it is equally probable that it went with them to Khotan. 
The introduction of Buddhism into both these places may be traced back 
to as early a time as the first or second centuries B.C. In both places, 
as the Chinese note, the Indian Brahmi developed “ slight alterations,” 16 
known to us in Kuchar as the peculiar Central-Asian Brahmi. 17 Hiuen 
Tsiang, in the passage above quoted seems to distinguish between the 
spoken and the written language of Khotan. By the latter, which he 
calls “ the mode of forming their sentences,” and which he says 
“ resembles the Indian model,” I presume he means Sanskrit or Pali, 
such as was used in Buddhist literature, and which can have been 
known only to a very limited class of people, the Religious and Learned. 
The “ spoken language,” which I take to have been that of the general 
population, must have been the Uighur Turk!, and this as Hiuen 
Tsiang says, differed “ from that of other countries,” i.e., China 
and India. This view is confirmed by a remark of Sung-yun (518 
A.D.) respecting Yarkand. Of this town he says, “their customs 
and spoken language are like those of the people of Khotan, but the 
written character in use is that of the Brahmans,” 18 i.e , the Indian 
Brahmi. Moreover, Fabian (400 A.D.) reports expressly with regard 
to the whole of Eastern Turkestan, that though the people speak 
different Turk! (Hu) dialects, “the professed disciples of Buddha 
among them all use Indian books and the Indian (Sanskrit) language.” 19 
None of these Chinese Buddhist pilgrims appears to have noticed the 
existence of the Kharosthi script, whether in Khotan or in its Indian 
home-land. The only script of the Semitic class which Hiuen Tsiang 
noticed, he mentions in connection with the kingdom of Kesli, 20 and this 
script cannot have been the Kharosthi, though it may have been allied to 
it. Possibly in their time, Kharosthi had practically ceased to exist. 
In Khotan, at the time of the Indo-Chinese coins, it was evidently the 
secular official script of the native Government, though not quite 
exclusively so, as is shown by the Kharosthi manuscript found near 
that town by M. Dutreil .de Rhins and containing a portion of the 
Buddhist Dhammapada. 21 It does not seem probable that, after the 
18 With regard to Kuchar, see Hiuen Tsiang's remark, in Beal’s Buddhist Records 
of the Western World , Vol. I, p. 19. 
11 See a description of it in my Report, in the Journal , ds. Soc . Beng., Vol. LXVI 
(1897), p. 242, LX1I, p. 4. 
18 See Beal’s Buddhist Records of the Western World, Vol. I, p. lxxxix. 
' See ibidem, Vol. I, p. xxiv. 
See ibidem, Vol. I, p. 38. 
21 See Comptes Rendus de L'Academic des Inscriptions, Vol. XXV, (1897), pp. 
251 if. 
