Kroraina

chained_bear commented on the word Kroraina

"The wooden documents from the site and others nearby confirmed the existence of a small oasis kingdom stretching 500 miles (800 km) along the southern Silk Road route--all the way from the site of Niya to the salt lake of Lop Nor in the east. The Kroraina Kingdom flourished from around 200 CE to 400 CE. The native inhabitants spoke a language that was never written down and is totally lost (except for their names as recorded by outsiders).

"The only reason we know anything about these people is due to the arrival of immigrants from across the mountains to the west--immigrants who did have a writing system, Kharoshthi. They used this script to record land deeds, disputes, official business, and thousands of other important events. The Kharoshthi script is the key unlocking the history of the Kroraina civilization and in particular the lost cities of Niya, where most documents were found, and a site even deeper in the desert, Loulan, that was the capital of Kroraina for part of the kingdom's history. Supplementing these documents are valuable Chinese texts dating from the Han dynasty....

"The immigrants came from the Gandhara region of modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. The script they learned to write on wooden documents is the first proof of sustained cultural exchanges on the Silk Road in the late second century. These immigrants gave the kingdom its name, Kroraina; the Chinese name for it was Shanshan."

--Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 26

December 30, 2016