Sir Aurel Stein, Archaeological Explorer.

• Author: KROLL, PAUL W.
• Position: Review

Sir Aurel Stein, Archaeological Explorer. By JEANETTE MIRSKY. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1998. Pp. xiii + 585, maps, illus.

This paperbound reprint of Jeanette Mirsky's 1977 biography of one of the great Orientalists is very welcome. Stein (1862-1943) was first and by training an Indologist, but his enduring fame--and his knighthood--was acquired through his three archaeological expeditions (1900-1, 1906-8, 1913-16) in Central Asia. The hoards of documents and art objects that he recovered (some say "looted") from the desert wastes of the Taklamakan sharpened and changed forever our view of intraAsian history and cultural contact. It is one of the ironies of scholarship that Stein, who had no Chinese and who was interested in China only marginally, insofar as it evidenced the diffusion via Central Asia of Indian thought, should have become most famous for and his name most indelibly associated with the cache of texts he removed from Tun-huang, the bulk of which material was in Chinese and therefore opaque to him but which helped...