number of documents and temple paintings at the same site, which had been undisturbed since the eleventh century a.d.

Stein’s third expedition completed his circuit of the Taklamakan Desert via Russian territory, and he traced the Silk Route to Samarkand, returning south through eastern Persia to Baluchistan. The difficult political situation in central Asia between the two world wars prevented the completion of his fourth trip—but he did manage to travel 2,000 miles around the Taklamakan once more. The scientific record of Stein’s trips was published in Ancient Khotan (1907, 2 vols), Serindia (1921, 5 vols), Innermost Asia (1928, 4 vols), and Memoir on Maps of Chinese Turkistan and Kansu (1923), and his narrative accounts of the same appeared in Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan (1903), Ruins of Desert Cathay (1912, 2 vols), and The Thousand Buddhas (1921).

Difficulties traveling in central Asia led Stein to travel in Baluchistan and Persia between 1927 and 1936 to explore the connections between the Indus Civilization, unearthed by sir john marshall in what is now Pakistan, and the civilizations of the Euphrates in the Near East. He discovered extensive Chalcolithic and Neolithic remains and published Archaeological Reconnaissances in North-Western India and South-Eastern Iran (1937) and Old Routes of Western Iran (1940). In 1929, with the help of the Royal Air Force, Stein had carried out an aerial survey of the Roman frontier in Iraq and the Jezira, and he investigated these finds on the ground and in detail between 1938 and 1939.

As a consequence of his travels throughout the Near East and central Asia, Stein became interested in searching for traces of Alexander the Great’s eastern campaigns between 331 and 323 b.c. He had already found some evidence of Alexander in southwestern Persia near persepolis and in the Greco-Buddhist remains in the Swat Valley of northern Pakistan. In 1931, Stein traveled from Taxila east of the Indus River to the Jhelum River, where he located the site of the defeat of Poros and explained Alexander’s tactics. In 1943, at the age of eighty, Stein’s last expedition traced the retreat of Alexander’s army through Baluchistan. He then went on to visit Kabul, in Afghanistan, where he died suddenly.

In many ways, Stein was the last of the great nineteenth-century explorers: physically tough, fearless, possessed of a brilliant intellect, a superb linguist, independent, and able to travel with only loyal and local colleagues and guides as companions. In other ways, he was unique in the breadth of his achievements. Stein was a nomad with no home base to speak of, and on his occasional visits to England he stayed at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He never married, but he had many close friends and he supported relatives in Hungary after World War I. He left his estate to create the Stein-Arnold Fund to be used for the geographic and antiquarian exploration of central and southwestern Asia. He received the founder’s gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society in 1904, the gold medal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1932, that of the society of antiquaries of london in 1935, the Flinders Petrie Medal in 1928, the Huxley medallion, and honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and St. Andrews.

Tim Murray

See also

Iran; South Asia

References

Walker, A. 1995. Aurel Stein: Pioneer of the Silk Road. London: John Murray.

Steno, Nicolas

(1638–1686)

Born in Copenhagen, Nicolas Steno went to Amsterdam to study anatomy and became the physician of the grand duke of Florence, Ferdinand II, in 1665. Steno became interested in geology, and in 1669 he published a landmark geology book on basic crystallography in which he claimed that fossils were the remains of ancient living organisms and that many rocks were the result of sedimentation. He also proposed that the chronological history of the earth could be understood by studying the earth’s strata (stratigraphy) and that landscape was the result of changes in the earth’s crust. Although he believed that all of this change had occurred over a long time, he was restricted by religious dogma to only being able to estimate 6,000 years for the entire history of the earth.

Steno abandoned science and converted to Catholicism in 1667. He became a priest in