62 
Dr. Hoernle —Antiquities from Central Asia. [Extra No. 1, 
that the particular process of paper manufacture which is still followed 
in Khotan may have been in vogue there for centuries before. At all 
events, it caunot well be supposed that those books, which are printed 
on old paper of a kind never known, or no more known in Khotan, are 
modern Khotanese forgeries. If they are modern forgeries, they must have 
been forged somewhere else than Khotan ; and this complicates the theory 
of forgery with additional improbabilities. Further, some of the books, 
admittedly or probably written on paper of Khotanese manufacture, 
exhibit peculiarities which it may safely be said, would not have occurred 
to a forger to introduce. I refer, for example, to the sketches of heads, 
which are found in books No. I of the Fourth Set and No. V of the 
Seventh Set, 8 to the occurrence of the recensions Iq and lh in book No. 
VIII of the Fifth Set, and to the Pothi with its entirely Indian arrange¬ 
ment. Such books cannot well be forgeries. 
Further, forgeries may be admitted to be quite possible in the case 
of block-prints, in the reprinting of which from genuine old blocks 
there is no serious difficulty. But it is different with manuscripts ; and 
let it be noted, that there are not only fragments of manuscripts, but 
whole books—some of them fairly large books—of manuscript. The 
difficulties of forging these would be enormous. In this case there are 
no duplicates. There are, indeed, a fair number of them in the collec¬ 
tion ; but they are all different from one another. It would mean that 
they had all been forged, within a comparatively short time, from no 
models whatsoever. Some are written on paper which is not Khotanese 
at all; others are on paper, similar to that of some of the block-prints, 
but of a variety now obsolete {viz. Ilia). Some are bound in the 
Indian fashion of a Pothi; others in the Khotanese fashion with copper 
pegs or twists of paper. These manuscripts cannot be forgeries ; and 
pro tanto they make against the hypothesis of forgery in the case of the 
block-prints. 
The mystery of the scripts—so many, and so intricately arranged— 
is, no doubt a difficulty. But to solve it by the hypothesis of forgery 
is only to substitute one riddle, and a harder one, for another. How 
can Islam Akhun and his comparatively illiterate confederates be credited 
with the no mean ingenuity necessary for excogitating them ? More¬ 
over the riddle of one of the scripts, which occurs in two of the manu- 
8 These sketches are not easily observable. The books were some months in 
my hands, before I discovered them, and I did so only on carefully examining them 
page by page. Their existence does not appear to have been known either to 
Mr. Macartney or to Islam Akhun who sold them to him. It does not seem pro¬ 
bable that a forger would have omitted to draw the buyer’s attention to the exist¬ 
ence of such a valuable peculiarity in his own handiwork. 
