2007-02-05
[Mirrored from http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2007/02/fragments-from-lost-city-fragment-1.html]
The remains of the Tangut fortress city known in Mongolian as Kharakhoto "Black City" and in Chinese as Heishuicheng 黑水城 "Black Water City" are located in the Gobi desert in the far west of Inner Mongolia (41° 45′ 51.50″N, 101° 08′ 38.00″E). It was a major military outpost of the Western Xia regime until it was captured by Genghis Khan in 1226. The city remained under Mongolian control until it was taken by the army of the newly established Ming dynasty in 1372, after which it was abandoned.
When the Russian explorer Pyotr Kozlov stumbled upon the ruins of the city in 1907-1909 he found hundreds of books and documents written in the Tangut script, mostly hidden inside a stupa, including such important works as the Tangut dictionary The Sea of Characters.
But by the time that Aurel Stein came to visit Kharakhoto during his expedition of 1913-1916 there was not much left, and he was reduced to searching through rubbish tips and looking down wells. Although he didn't manage to find any complete Tangut texts such as Kozlov had, he did manage to recover a great number of fragmentary scraps of paper with Tangut writing, some 4,000 of which are now held at the British Library (enter "Kharakhoto" in the search box to see some examples).
One of the more insignificant of these scraps of paper, catalogued as Or.8212/1178 (K.K.0150.y), comprises but a solitary character :
When I was searching the IDP database for examples of Phags-pa texts several years ago I mistakenly identified this character as the Phags-pa letter tsa ꡐ [U+A850]. I guess it was an easy enough mistake to make because the character does look exactly like the Phags-pa letter, but the shadow of a candrabindu above the letter should have been a clue that this was something else. Looking at it again recently it struck me that I had seen something very similar to this on a couple of Yuan dynasty artefacts, including this official pass (paizi 牌子) :
Source : Minzu Yuwen 民族語文 1995.3.
The centre column is Phags-pa Mongolian, reading mu qu ri qu khė r-ė ꡏꡟ ꡢꡟ ꡘꡞ ꡢꡟ ꡁꡦ ꡘꡖꡦ (from an obscure Mongolian verb muquri- "to patrol" plus gerege "pass"), but although the syllable on top could be read as Phags-pa uṃ ꡳꡟ, I don't think that it is actually Phags-pa (Professor Junast reads it as Phags-pa u = Chinese wǔ 五, as a kind of shorthand for wǔ gēng 五更 "fifth watch" [the period just before dawn], with a Tibetan Sun and Moon symbol above it).
And in my Book of Yuan Dynasty Seals there is the following example of a signature seal which perfectly matches the character on the piece of paper from Kharakhoto :
Source : Yuandai Yinfeng 元代印風 (Chongqing Chubanshe, 1999) p.240.
Whilst it does look very similar to the Phags-pa syllable tsaṃ ꡳꡐ, that makes no sense, and I think that the base consonant beneath the candrabindu must be the letter a in a Brahmic script. The letter a is written as अ [U+0905] in Devanagari, but in the Lantsa script it is much closer in form to the above letter :
Source : Lanzhati Fanzi Rumen 蘭札體梵字入門 p.284.
And in the closely related Wartu script the letter a is an even better match :
However, Wartu letters are written with angular strokes and the letters found on the Kharakhoto scrap of paper and the Yuan dynasty seal are written with rounded strokes, so I'm not really sure how to classify the script used to write them. Accepting that the syllable under discussion is the letter a in some style of Brahmic script, with a candrabindu sign above it, then it still does not make much sense. I suspect that in these cases the letter a with a candrabindu is equivalent to the mantric syllable oṃ, i.e. it corresponds to the special Devanagari symbol for oṃ ॐ [U+0950].
Finally, looking back at the scrap of paper from Kharakhoto, it looks to me as if the syllable oṃ is not hand-written, but has been stamped onto the paper with a seal.