Didn't know until this week that the Tangut library came out of a grave rather than a building. The men who actually walked Kozlov in were local Torgut herders from the Edsen Gol country, who knew the ruin was there and had known for generations; the records I can find don't give me their names, which is the usual arrangement and still annoys me. They took: camels, tins for water, winter clothing for nights well below freezing, and a map that was mostly blank paper with a river drawn optimistically.
Kozlov, born 1863, reached the walls in 1908 and came back the following year to a stupa outside them. Inside, stacked, were something like two thousand books and scrolls in Tangut, a language barely read at that point. So a burial got opened and a library got crated, and both of those are true at once. The crates went to St Petersburg, where people are still reading them.
That Edsen Gol stretch still holds wild camels, Inés — a few hundred left, plus black-tailed gazelle. The counting now is mostly Mongolian and Chinese reserve staff doing winter transects at waterholes, and the camels think about as much of them as they did of Kozlov's string.
The thing that unlocked the script was in the crates too — a bilingual Tangut-Chinese glossary from about 1190, usually called the Pearl in the Palm, which is effectively a phrasebook someone compiled for traders. Nikolai Nevsky spent years on it and his Tangut dictionary only came out long after he'd died.