Thanks for your comment. It’s hard to get the nuances right in a brief blog post! A likely scenario is that Tibetan rituals with pre-Buddhist roots — performed by people inhabiting the ritual roles of bon po, sku gshen and the like — continued alongside Buddhism during and after the Tibetan imperial period. The tensions of this situation can be seen in polemical texts like the one I mentioned in this post, and in the “Buddhicized” funeral ritual in Pelliot tibétain 239. One interesting aspect of the wooden dockets is that they do suggest whatever adherence to Buddhism the soldiers felt or were expected to show, it was not exclusive of participating in these sorts of rituals.

S.

Some of the pointy slips, like IOL Tib N 1443, are notched.

One thinks of the cutting of the record into two parts (khram gnyis bgyis in PT 1042), one for the deceased and one for the living. (Actually, one for the skyibs lug and one for the chief assistant in the funeral, or something similar.) Perhaps the record kept by the living was invested with power or had a talismanic effect. It is interesting to go back to Rona-Tas’ article on the tally stick in Tibetan wrathful iconography in light of these sticks from Miran.

S.

Yes, and I think I’ve seen a Central Asian version of those four-sided dice as well. And we do have Dunhuang documents on divination which line up the results of the roll of two dice, each one as rows of dots (not stacked on top of each other as in our six-sided dice). There’s a very similar method found in a Turkic manuscript as well. Anyway, despite the similarity in shape, I don’t see that the ritual sticks having a similar role to dice; the text just continues from one side to the next, in a continuous flow. The previous comment on the modern use of wooden sticks inscribed with the names of donors or recipients of the ritual might be closer to what we have here, as there are a couple of sticks with personal names on them.

S.

S.