Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/101

 70 contain. Traditions lose nothing from age or from being often repeated, and no doubt, the stories of hidden treasures are now—and, indeed, were in Mirza Haidar's time—ancient enough to acquire a very strong influence on numbers of the population. From time to time ornaments, vessels, images, and coins of great curiosity are unearthed, but their value to the finders, whose only interest lies in the worth of the metal they are made of, can scarcely be great. Perhaps the only systematic exploitation of the ancient sites, ever undertaken, is that of Mirza Abá Bakr, Amir of Kashghar, so fully described by our author. It may be dated about the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, and we may infer that nearly everything of intrinsic value was brought to light, while much that was of antiquarian interest was destroyed, so that when, at some future time, civilised explorers come to investigate the ruins, and find little to reward their labours, they may feel themselves indebted to the cupidity of Mirza Abá Bakr for their disappointment. The tales which the author tells of the riches accumulated by the Mirza, may safely be regarded as, in a great measure, fabulous; but it is precisely tales such as these that have given rise to the inflated estimates of buried wealth so common in the country, even at the present day.

Here and there valuable records of the past may still be forthcoming from the submerged towns, like those obtained in 1874, by Sir D. Forsyth, who enumerates a figure of Buddha of the tenth century, a clay figure of the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman, and Hindu women's ornaments, all pointing to that close intercourse with India which we know, from other sources, to have existed in times before Muhammadanism prevailed and crushed it. He also obtained several Greek coins of great antiquity and interest. Among these is mentioned especially one of Antimachus, dating about 140, and another, of Menander, from about the year 126 , while a third, an iron one of Hermæus, might, it was thought, prove even older than either of these. But it is not necessarily among the ruins buried by the shifting sands, that relics of remote ages will be found. Very ancient remains are known already to exist at various points along the southern spurs of the Tian Shan, though nothing has yet been ascertained as to the age they belong to. It was near the town of Kuchar—the ancient Kuitze of the Chinese—that Captain Bower found the famous birch-bark manuscript, written in Sanskrit and dating from