Khotanese Erotic

The Khotanese were an Iranian-speaking Saka people who ran the oasis kingdom of Khotan, on the southern rim of the Tarim Basin in what is now Hotan, Xinjiang, from the last centuries BCE until the Kara-Khanid conquest of about 1006. They did not vanish so much as dissolve: over the following centuries their descendants became Muslim and Turkic-speaking, and they count among the ancestors of today's Uyghurs of Hotan.

What set them apart was position and product. Khotan sat where two rivers, the Yurungkash and the Karakash, come down out of the Kunlun carrying jade, white in one and dark in the other, and Chinese courts wanted that stone for over a thousand years. The kingdom was also among the first places outside China to make silk, and its own legend credits a Chinese bride who hid silkworm eggs in her headdress to get them past the border guards. A painted wooden panel at Dandan Oilik shows the scene, with an attendant pointing at her hair.

Their language, Khotanese Saka, was Eastern Iranian, a cousin of Sogdian and a distant one of Pashto, with a sister tongue in Tumshuqese to the northwest and, some linguists argue, its nearest living relative in Wakhi of the Pamirs. It was written in a Brahmi script borrowed from India, the early administration ran in Gandhari Prakrit, and the kingdom's founding story claims exiles from Taxila in the time of Ashoka. Khotan looked south for its models.

Buddhism was the organizing fact of public life. Khotan was a Mahayana stronghold where Chinese monks came looking for texts. Faxian, around 400, described a procession of images that the king came out to meet barefoot; Xuanzang, two and a half centuries later, counted about a hundred monasteries. The longest surviving work in the language, the Book of Zambasta, is a Buddhist verse compendium whose author grumbles that his countrymen did not accept the teaching as the real thing when it was put in Khotanese.

Khotan was a small state between large ones: a Tang garrison seat in the seventh and eighth centuries, under Tibetan rule from the end of the eighth century to the middle of the ninth, then independent again and tied by marriage to the rulers of Dunhuang, where King Viśa Sambhava appears as a donor in the Mogao caves wearing Chinese imperial dress. The kingdom fell to the Muslim Kara-Khanids of Kashgar after decades of war. Most of what is known about them comes from what the desert kept: manuscripts sealed in the Dunhuang library cave, and documents and paintings dug from the sand-buried sites around Hotan, many by Aurel Stein in the early 1900s.