Indian Antiquary Vol 39

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 19

JANUARY, 1910.) ARCHÆOLOGICAL NOTES DURING EXPLORATIONS.
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them hard at work for ten to eleven hours daily. Kharoshthi records on wood, whether letters, accounts, drafts, or memos, turned up in almost every one of these dwellings, besides household objects and implements illustrative of everyday life and the prevailing industries. Though nothing of intrinsic value had been left behind by the last dwellers of this modest Pompeii, there was sufficient evidence of the ease in wbich they had lived in fine wood carvings, etc., in the large number of individual rooms provided with fireplaces, comfortable sitting platforms, etc. Remains of fenced gardens and of avenues of poplars or truit trees could be traced almost invariably near these houses. Where dunes had afforded protection, the gaant, bleached trunks in these orchards, chiefly mulberry trees, still rose as high as J0 to 12 feet. With so much of these ancient homesteads in almost perfect preservation, and being constantly reminded of identical arrangements in modern Turkestan houses, I often caught myself wanting, as it were, in antiquarian respect for these relics of a past buried since nearly seventeen centuries.
I must forego any attempt at detailed description of the results here yielded by a fortnight of exacting but fruitful work. Yet a particularly rich baal of ancient documents may claim mention were it only on account of the characteristic conditions under which it was discovered. I was clearing a large residence in a group of ruins on the extreme west of the site which had on my previous visit been traced too late for complete exploration, and which I had ever since kept faithfully in petto. Fine pieces of Architectural wood carving brought to light near a large central hall soon proved that the dwelling must have been that of a well-to-do person, and finds of Kharoshthi records of respectable size, including a wooden tablet fully 3 feet long, in what appeared to have been all ante-room, suggested his having been an official of some consequence. The hope of finding more in his office was soon justified when the first strokes of the ketman laid bare regnlar packets of documents near the floor of a narrow room adjoining the central hall. Their number soon rose to over a hundred. Most of them were" wedges " as used for the conveyance of executive orders; others, on oblong tablets, accounts, lists and miscellaneous office papers", to use an anachronism. Evidently we had hit upon office files thrown down here and excellently preserved, under the cover of 5 to 6 feet of sand. The scraping of the mud flooring for detached pieces was still proceeding, when a strange discovery rewarded honest Rustam, the most experienced digger of my " old guard." Already during the first clearing I had noticed a large lump of clay or plaster near the wall where the packets of tablets lay closest. I had ordered it to be left undisturbed, though I thought little of its having come to that place by more than accident. Rustam had just extracted between it and the wall a well-preserved double wedge tablet when I saw him eagerly burrow with his hands into the floor just as when my little terrier is at work opening rat-holes. Before I could put any questions, I saw Rustam triumphantly draw forth from circ, 6 inches below the floor a complete rectangular document with its double clay seal intact and its envelope still unopened. When the hole was enlarged, we saw that the space towards the wall and below the foundation beam of the latter was full of closely packed layers of similar documents.
It was clear that we had struck a small hidden archive, and my joy at this novel experience was great, for apart from the interest of the documents themselves and their splendid preservation, the condition in which they were found furnished very valuable indications. The fact that, with a few exceptions, all the rectangular documents, of which fully three dozen were cleared in the end, had their elaborated string fastenings unopened and sealed down on the envelope, confirmed the conjectural explanation I had arrived at in the case of a few previous finds of this kind, that these were agreements or bonds which had to be kept nnder their original fastening and seals in order that in case of need their validity might be safely establiehed. Characteristically enough, the only two open records proved letters addressed in due form to the “Hon'ble Cojhbo Sojaka, dear to gods and men," whose name and title I had read already before on many of the official notes dug up previously in the scattered files. The care which bad been taken to hide the deposit and at