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DECEMBER, 1909.) ARCHÆOLOGICAL NOTES DURING EXPLORATIONS.
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ARCHÆOLOGICAL NOTES DURING EXPLORATIONS
IN CENTRAL ASIA IN 1906-8.1
BY DR. M. AUREL STEIN.
Preface by the Editor. My old friend, Dr. Aurel Stein, has been kind enough to enable me to extract at the earliest opportunity the archæological matter contained in his account of his last great journey in Central Asia, which he first read before the Royal Geographical Society in March last and subsequently before the Royal Asiatic Society and elsewhere.
The extraordinary success that attended his journey from the antiquarian and archæological points of view is indicated in the extracts now printed. The great variety of hardships endured will be found in some detail in the full account as published by the Royal Geographical Society, we will also the extremely valuable geographical results of the journey.
I gladly take this opportunity of testifying to the admiration that all cognisant of what Dr. Stein has achieved and endured, feel in respect of the pluck, endurance, skill and knowledge that he has once again exhibited in this last splendid effort of travel.
The Sketch Map accompanying this paper has been prepared by my son, Lieut. R. D. Temple, F. R.G.S., King's Royal Rifles.
Introductory Romarks. Ever since I had retarned in 1901 from my first journey into Chinese Turkestan, happy recollections of congenial labour spent in its mountains and desert had made me long for a chance of fresh explorations. There was reason to hope that the ruins of sites long ago abandoned to the desert would yield more relics of that ancient civilization which, as the joint product of Indian, Chinese, and classical influences, had once flourished in the oasis fringing the Tarim basin, and upon which it had been my good fortune to throw light by my former excavations. But the scientific elaboration of the results then secured cost time and great efforts, having to be carried on largely by the side of exacting official duties, and it was not until the summer of 1904 that I was able to submit to the Government of India detailed proposals about another journey which was to carry me back to my old archæological hunting-grounds around the Taklamakan Desert and thence much further eastwards, to Lop-nor and the Great Wall of China.
I had originally tried hard for permission to start during the summer of 1905. But the freedom from official routine work which I needed for the completion of my Detailed Report on
he previous journey, itself an indispensable preliminary to fresh work, could not be secured antil the following autumn and winter. So it was only in April, 1906, that I could set out from Kashmir, where by six months' incessant desk-work, more fatiguing to me than any hard marching or digging, I had managed to finish- and even to see through the press in distant Oxford-those two stout quarto volumes of Ancient Khotan. For my entry into Chinese Turkestan I had chosen this time a route singularly interesting for the student of early geography and ethnography, but practically closed now to the European traveller. It was to take me from the Peshawar district, on the Indian administrative border, through the independent tribal territory of Swat and Dir, into Chitral and thence across the Baroghil to the Upper Oxos Valley and the Afghan Pamirs.
1. Extracts from a paper read at the Royal Geographical Society, Maroh 8, 1909, and printed in full in the Geographical Journal, for July and September, 1909.
