Spitzer Manuscript Report On Work In Progress

Author(s): Eli Franco
Publisher: Eli Franco

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The Spitzer Manuscript-Report on Work in Progress
Eli Franco
Between 1902 and 1914 four German expeditions were dispatched to the Central Asian Silk Road in the area called Eastern Turkestan and Chinese Turkestan under the directorship of Albert Grunwedel and Albert von Le Coq. A fifth expedition was already at the planning stage when World War I broke out bringing with it the termination of German activities in that part of the world. As is well known, the expeditions were extremely successful and returned to Berlin with rich booty including, amazingly enough, most beautiful murals removed from cave walls in their entirety; many of them, however, were destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II. Some of the surviving pieces of art returned to the Berlin museum of ethnology after the war, others were transported as Beutekunst mainly to the USSR but also to the USA. The German expeditions were also successful in recovering thousands of manuscripts and block-prints, usually fragmentary or incomplete, in no less than seventeen languages and twenty-four scripts.
Most of the Sanskrit manuscripts, the earliest of which go back to the Kuşāņa times, were discovered in the so-called Rotkuppelraum ("room of the red cupola") in the Ming-öi ("thousand caves") near Kyzil. The epoch-making work of Heinrich Lüders on the early Buddhist dramas and the Sariputraprakarana, the Kalpanamaṇḍitika, Katantra and Kaumāralata as well as Dieter Schlingloff's work on the Chandoviciti and the so-called Yogalehrbuch, are all based on manuscripts found in this cave. In his reports on the second and third Turfan expeditions, published some twenty years after the event, von Le Coq still captures the excitement of the discovery very vividly:
Die Erfolge, die wir hier erzielten, liessen alle anderen, früheren, weit hinter sich. Überall fanden wir neue, unberührte Tempel, voll der interessantesten und künstlerisch vollkommensten Bilder, alle aus fru
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