of the Dharmapada, and the Pratimoksha of the Sarvastivadin school.  Fa-Hsien states that the monks of Central Asia were all students of the language of India and even in the seventh century Hsuan Chuang tells us the same of Kucha.  Portions of a Sanskrit grammar have been found near Turfan and in the earlier period at any rate Sanskrit was probably understood in polite and learned society.  Some palm leaves from Ming-Oi contain fragments of two Buddhist religious dramas, one of which is the Sariputra-prakarana of Asvaghosha.  The handwriting is believed to date from the epoch of Kanishka so that we have here the oldest known Sanskrit manuscripts, as well as the oldest specimens of Indian dramatic art.[459] They are written like the Indian classical dramas in Sanskrit and various forms of Prakrit.  The latter represent hitherto unknown stages in the development of Indian dialects and some of them are closely allied to the language of Asoka’s inscriptions.  Another Prakrit text is the version of the Dharmapada written in Kharoshthi characters and discovered by the Dutreuil de Rhins mission near Khotan,[460] and numerous official documents in this language and alphabet have been brought home by Stein from the same region.  It is probable that they are approximately coeval with the Kushan dynasty in India and the use of an Indian vernacular as well as of Sanskrit in Central Asia shows that the connection between the two countries was not due merely to the introduction of Buddhism.

Besides these hitherto unknown forms of Prakrit, Central Asia has astonished the learned world with two new languages, both written in a special variety of the Brahmi alphabet called Central Asian Gupta.  One is sometimes called Nordarisch and is regarded by some authorities as the language of the Sakas whose incursions into India appear to have begun about the second century B.C. and by others as the language of the Kushans and of Kanishka’s Empire.  It is stated that the basis of the language is Iranian but strongly influenced by Indian idioms.[461] Many translations of Mahayanist literature (for instance the Suvarnaprabhasa, Vajracchedika and Aparimitayus Sutras) were made into it and it appears to have been spoken principally in the southern part of the Tarim basin.[462] The other new language was spoken principally on its northern edge and has been called Tokharian, which name implies that it was the tongue of the Tokhars or Indoscyths.[463] But there is no proof of this and it is safer to speak of it as the language of Kucha or Kuchanese.  It exists in two different dialects known as A and B whose geographical distribution is uncertain but numerous official documents dated in the first half of the seventh century show that it was the ordinary speech of Kucha and Turfan.  It was also a literary language and among the many translations discovered are versions in it of the Dharmapada and Vinaya.  It is extremely interesting to find that this language spoken by the early and perhaps original inhabitants of Kucha not only belongs to the Aryan family but is related more nearly to the western than the eastern branch.  It cannot be classed in the Indo-Iranian group but shows perplexing affinities to Latin, Greek, Keltic, Slavonic and Armenian.[464] It is possible that it influenced Chinese Buddhist literature.[465]