Lurching towards ergativity: expressions of agency in the Niya Documents

Abstract

The Niya Documents are a collection of some 760 or so texts, on wood, paper, leather, silk, etc., which were found (primarily) by Sir Aurel Stein in his Central Asian expeditions of 1900–01, 1906 07, 1913–14, at several ruined sites around Niya on the southern Silk Route. They are short texts, ranging from sentence fragments and brief lists to well-preserved connected texts of up to long lines, and they contain administrative records (deeds, bills of sale, etc.) and administrative correspondence (about criminal and civil complaints, tax collection, governmental management, and dangers from without) of the kingdom of Shan-Shan or Kroraina. One of their remarkable features to an indologist is that they are more or less securely datable, to a period of approximately 90 years in the third century A.D.