TY  - JOUR
T1  - Modes of Burial and Mourning Rituals in Kucha: On the Central Role of the Yurt and the Unique Find of a Coffin
AU  - KLEIN, Astrid 
JO  - Acta Via Serica
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/6/29
DO  - 10.22679/avs.2025.10.2.006
AB  - In Kucha, approximately forty painted wooden caskets or parts of them have been found, which are interpreted as bone receptacles for the cremated remains of certain individuals. They correspond to caskets represented in the central pillar caves in connection with the “sharing of the Buddha’s relics” and are dated to the same period between the sixth and seventh centuries, when Kucha was under the control of the Göktürks. In appearance and construction details, the bone receptacles reflect key features of the yurt, a tent that served nomadic peoples in Central Asia as a portable home, but also as a place to hold all important ceremonies when a member of the community died. The Chinese chronicle Zhoushu 周書 describes such burial ceremonies around a yurt as a characteristic of the Early Turks; but the yurt also plays a central role in burials excavated in Mongolia and on the northern Tibetan Plateau. Painted representations and archaeological finds from Kucha indicate that, under the influence of the Göktürks, parts of these Central Asian burial and mourning practices were adopted into the local Tocharian culture.
In the central pillar caves, such elements of local burial culture appear to be integrated into the representations of the parinirvāṇa story cycle. The present paper shows that this also applies to the coffin, which until now has only been known in Western research from depictions of the cremation of the Buddha. However, a comparable archaeological find was made during Chinese excavations in 1978 and two painted wooden panels, published here for the first time, may originally have belonged to the side walls of another coffin from Kucha. The dating suggests that coffin burials took place before the sixth century.