{"id":1264,"date":"2011-01-19T22:10:11","date_gmt":"2011-01-20T05:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/?p=1264"},"modified":"2011-01-23T21:36:29","modified_gmt":"2011-01-24T04:36:29","slug":"niya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2011\/01\/19\/niya\/","title":{"rendered":"Niya"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s an important historical site at <a title=\"Niya on Wikipedia\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Niya_(Tarim_Basin)\">Niya<\/a> &#8212; on the southern rim of the Taklamakan desert in Xinjiang, western China &#8212; that I wish I could find out more about. \u00a0I know that there have been Japanese teams digging there for years, but it&#8217;s hard to find good archeological field reports. \u00a0There&#8217;s lots of <a title=\"Kharosthi documents from Niya\" href=\"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/silkroad\/texts\/niyadocts.html\">textual evidence<\/a> which was found (plundered, stolen even) in the early twentieth century, so <a title=\"Google Books. _Religion and Chinese society_, ed. John Lagerwey\" href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=nSKT4qpILEkC&amp;pg=PA279&amp;lpg=PA279&amp;dq=niya+texts&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=ouTjwtVBQ4&amp;sig=J3a7-GAHbgujZo0PDoV-BlKKx7I&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=tdc0TfWsN4bCsAPiqs3VBQ&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=4&amp;ved=0CCkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;q=niya%20texts&amp;f=false\">we know a fair bit<\/a> about the early medieval history of the place, which was part of the region called &#8216;Kroraina&#8217; in the local language, a kind of <a title=\"Gandhari prakrit\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/G%C4%81ndh%C4%81r%C4%AB_language\">Gandhari<\/a> praktrit written in <a title=\"Kharosthi\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kharosthi\">Kharo\u1e63\u1e6dh\u012b<\/a>. \u00a0Especially interesting to me was the unique style of part-time monasticism that the Buddhists of the region practiced, where householders temporarily took robes.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Anyway, here&#8217;s a map I sketched many years ago; before throwing it out I figured I&#8217;d scan and post it:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/files\/2011\/01\/niya.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-1265\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/files\/2011\/01\/niya-741x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"474\" height=\"655\" srcset=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/files\/2011\/01\/niya-741x1024.jpg 741w, https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/files\/2011\/01\/niya-217x300.jpg 217w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 474px) 100vw, 474px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s an important historical site at Niya &#8212; on the southern rim of the Taklamakan desert in Xinjiang, western China &#8212; that I wish I could find out more about. \u00a0I know that there have been Japanese teams digging there &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2011\/01\/19\/niya\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1421],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-central-asia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s8jQA6-niya","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1264"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1296,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions\/1296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}