For a long time, researchers have been trying to determine the age of a Buddhist cave temple situated at the Mogao site along the path of the Silk Route in China. It is thought to be built somewhere between the 9th and 14th century. The Mogao Caves are situated at the end of the Gobi desert (northern China) near the Dachuan river. These are 492 caves which were and carved out of cliffs. Each cave had been carved out for a long period of time, starting in the 4th century CE.
Silk Route
Silk Route is a network of various trade routes (both land and sea) connecting East Asia and Southeast Asia with South Asia, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, and Southern Europe. It was primarily established for the purpose of maintaining the economic, cultural, political, and religious interactions between these regions from the 2nd century BCE to the 18th century. The Silk Route derives its name from the trade in silk, initially developed in China since the era of the Han dynasty (207 BCE–220 CE).
Discovery of Hidden Inscriptions
In November 2020, hidden Sanskrit inscriptions on pieces of paper have been discovered on the ceilings of the cave 465, which is located to the north of the site. The inscriptions helped the researchers to determine the origins of the cave temple more accurately. It was quite an unusual discovery as they did not expect to find the pieces of paper, containing the inscriptions, stuck to the ceiling.
Cave 465 has pure and unique Indo-Tibetan style wall paintings. The paintings resembled the Thangkas (Tibetan Buddhist paintings) that were excavated from Khara-Khoto (located in western Inner Mongolia at the Tangut border town). These Thangkas showed that there were Tibetan and Indian Monks in the Tangut realm.
Professor Haida Liang, from the Nottingham Trent University, who is one of the researchers, had stated that this was a very interesting discovery as the rest of the caves in the Mogao site. All the caves have some Chinese influence in their style of art.
Dating the cave Temples
Dating the caves was a difficult task because they were built quite long ago. In order to decode what was mentioned in the inscriptions, the researchers had to use various technologies. To find out the secret behind the origin of the cave temples, the researchers used technologies including spectral imaging and machine learning. They captured large areas of wall paintings, forming around 5000 image cubes. The idea used here was to break down the infrared light to a certain extent where it was possible to generate the spectrum per pixel of the image which, as a result, made the nearby missing elements of the image to appear.
When the researchers backtracked these reconstructed versions of the images, they pointed back to the other fragments of paper. According to the research team, it was discovered that these were for a glorification ritual. They tried to backtrack the date of the writings as it would further help them to determine the date of these paintings. However, the imaging method with the band of lights they used could not provide the expected results. So, they tried a different algorithm as it was found that the paper had a different spectrum than red vermillion stamped letters. They further processed and enhanced the image based on this difference after which, the writing became clearly visible. The writing belonged to a Buddhist Sanskrit phrase, namely, the ‘summary of dependent origination’.
Apart from this, the researchers discovered that the text resembled the later stages of development of Nâgâri script, which was mainly used in the 12th century. The use of this script was identified in the writings, mainly based on the shape of the letters and the use of vowels. According to the study, the writings dated back to around 1190 CE and belonged to the Jayachandra inscriptions from Bodh-Gayâ. They had been developed as part of a glorification ritual and had been pasted on the walls in order to coincide with the structure of the cave temple itself.
The researchers finally concluded that the caves dated back to the late 12th to 13th century. Based on the dating, they found that the construction of these caves in Dunhuang (the city where the Mogao site is located) went on for longer than what they had assumed.
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