Born November 26, 1862,
Budapest, Hungary
Died October 26, 1943,
Kabul, Afghanistan
Sir Aurel Stein spent much of his life investigating the ancient history of central Asia. His greatest find was the “Caves of the Thousand Buddhas” in what was then Chinese Turkestan. A native of Hungary, he became a British citizen in 1904 and was knighted for his work in 1912. Stein’s long career did much to enlighten the world about Asia’s strategic role in the development of world culture.
Mark Aurel Stein was born in Budapest, Hungary, on November 26, 1862. His well-to-do family sent him to schools in Hungary and Germany, where he received his Ph.D. in archaeology in 1883. He went to Oxford University in England for postgraduate studies in 1884; while he was in England, his parents died. In 1888 he accepted a position at Punjab University in Lahore, India, where he stayed for the next 11 years. During his vacations Stein made archaeological expeditions into Kashmir and the Pamir and Gilgit mountain ranges and published several important works, including a twelfth-century history of India that was written in Sanskrit, the language of ancient India. He accepted another job in Calcutta in 1899, but his great ambition was to investigate the archaeological sites of central Asia. With support from the Indian government, he set out on his first expedition in March 1900.
The goal of Stein’s expedition was to explore the ruins of an ancient city in the Takla Makan Desert in western China, which had been discovered by the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin (see entry). Stein excavated part of the city, which had perished when its water supply from the Kun Lun Mountains dried up. He also investigated other sites near the city of Khotan, discovering several documents written in ancient languages and a number of artifacts that included neolithic stone tools and textiles. Stein also found ancient caravan routes between China and the West that revealed new information about this little-known region.
Stein’s second expedition started in 1906 with a return to the area around Khotan. He went as far as the shifting desert lake of Lop Nor and excavated at Lou-lan, a Chinese outpost from the second century that had also been discovered by Hedin. Stein’s greatest discoveries were at Tun-huang where he found the “Caves of the Thousand Buddhas,” which contained manuscripts, temple banners, and frescoes. The caves had served as a storehouse from the fifth to the tenth centuries but had been walled off since the 11th century. Stein’s discovery is said to be the greatest archaeological find ever made in Asia. Many of the treasures he found are housed in the Asian Antiquities Museum in New Delhi, India.
In 1907 Stein’s expedition explored the Nan Shan range and made a midwinter crossing of the Takla Makan. While exploring the Kun Lun Mountains in the summer of 1908 he suffered frostbite and had to return to India; the toes of one of his feet were amputated. Two years later Stein was appointed head of the Archaeological Survey of India. The organization sponsored him on his longest expedition, which began in 1913. He circled the Takla Makan and explored the Turfan Depression and far northwestern China.
Between 1913 and 1915 Stein made other great discoveries. At Kan-chou he found a hoard of manuscripts in the Tangut and Tibetan languages, and while he was in the region his Indian assistant surveyed the headwaters of the Kan-chou River. In 1915 he found the Sassanian wall paintings in Seistan, having traveled to Persia from Kashgar by way of the Pamir Mountains, Bukhara, and the Amu Darya River. From Seistan the expedition reached the Indus River by crossing Afghanistan. His journey then took him across the Pamirs into Russian Turkestan. Stein returned to India in 1916 by way of Persia and Baluchistan in what is now Pakistan.
Because of political instability caused by the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the early twentieth century, there was no access to central Asia for several years. In the meantime, Stein made journeys to Baluchistan and Persia. He traced the campaigns of Alexander the Great (see entry), providing precise locations of sieges and battles. For instance, in 1926 he identified the place where Alexander led a siege on the Rock of Aronos in present-day Pakistan. From 1927 to 1936 he studied mounds in Iran and Baluchistan, hoping to shed some light on the relationship between the civilizations of Mesopotamia and India.
Stein had wanted to investigate the ancient sites of Afghanistan for years, but political conditions had prevented it. In 1943 he was finally granted permission to travel to the area. A few days after his arrival in Kabul, however, he became ill; he died on October 26, 1943, one month before his eighty-first birthday. During his lifetime Stein wrote several books about his adventures and discoveries.
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