Dunhuang manuscripts — International Dunhuang Programme collections

evidence

The sealed library cave — Mogao Cave 17 — yielded tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings, textiles and printed texts dating from the late fourth to the early eleventh century, written in at least seventeen languages and twenty-four scripts, Chinese and Tibetan most prominent among them, alongside Sanskrit, Sogdian, Khotanese and Old Uyghur. The corpus is Buddhist, Manichaean, Christian and secular-commercial together — direct evidence that religious and commercial texts moved through the same oasis. V55 verification basis: the IDP catalogue was retrieved in summary; individual manuscript records were not consulted, this session having no direct network access to idp.bl.uk.

A evidence is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.