Gender Discrimination in the Tarim Basin

The Tarim Basin in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China was strategic on the ancient Silk Road.

Expeditions by European explorers in the 19th and 20th centuries found ruins of ancient oases settlements around the circumference of the Taklamakan Desert.

Amongst the ruins were artefacts, many documents and manuscripts written in different scripts and languages, some previously unknown. All attest to the cultural, religious and ethnic diversity of the region.

The focus of GENDISC is on the Niya Documents, a collection of approximately 1000 documents and document fragments dating to around the 3rd century CE found around the southern Tarim Basin, but mainly around the Niya ruins.

Three-quarters of the documents were written in the South Asian Kharosthi script and Gandhari language, earlier used in ancient Pakistan, Afghanistan and north India for inscriptions, manuscripts and coins.

Whilst politics, trade and religion are well-studied, there has been little examination of ancient society in the Tarim Basin because the sources are viewed as limited.

GENDISC will challenge this assumption by addressing social issues raised as legal disputes in the Niya Documents, including infanticide, adoption, witchcraft allegations, slavery, murder and marriage transactions.

It will identify gender roles (O1), the types of legal cases (O2) and the wider context of issues (O3), and will take a statistical and etymological approach (WP1), study religious texts (WP2) and examine other Tarim Basin documents (WP3) to establish if the documents are indicative of gender biases and discrimination.

GENDISC is interdisciplinary, incorporating studies of language, religion, gender, society and law within the broader field of archaeology and Asian studies.

It is trans-regional in scope and will identify connections between now politically- and culturally-sensitive territories. The findings will be disseminated through conferences, seminars, workshops, articles and a blog.