Textiles and Clothing Excavated from the Tombs of Buzak in Khotan

Abstract

In December 2006, the authors visited Khotan Museum to study the clothes on three bodies that had been discovered in the 1970s (M70), 1983 (M83), and 1984 (M84), from the tombs of Buzak, a cemetery situated south-west of Khotan city.1 All three tombs had been damaged by flooding on several occasions. Archaeologists from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Museum, Urumqi, and the local museum in Khotan excavated the tombs and brought the bodies back to Khotan museum. On the basis of the style of the coffins, the burials can be assigned to the pre-Islamic period from the tenth to the early eleventh centuries. Buzak is probably the only site in Khotan where textiles and clothes from the period immediately preceding the advent of Islam have been found and is therefore of great importance for Khotan studies. With the exception of M84:7, which is now in the Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi, all the exhibits are in the Khotan Museum, Khotan. Except for M84:7 and 8a, the textiles and clothing still cover the bodies. Since none has been given exhibit numbers, we have numbered them according to the year they were discovered.2 In the course of our investigations, we analyzed all the textiles and clothing and recorded the following details: