Sogdians

Rouran epoch Göktürk epoch Uyghur epoch Kirghiz epoch

Rouran First Göktürk Tang rule Second Göktürk Uyghur Kirghiz Huns Western Göktürk Türgesh Karluk Khazar

Rouran 400–554
First Göktürk 552–630
Tang rule 630–682
Second Göktürk 682–744
Uyghur 744–840
Kirghiz 840–924
Huns 370–469
Western Göktürk 552–659
Türgesh 699–766
Karluk 766–800
Khazar 650–969

The Sogdians were the people of the valleys between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, above all of the Zarafshan. The Chinese came to call the Zarafshan the river of the caravaneers. The Sogdians spoke an Iranian language. They founded Samarkand and Bukhara. For the four centuries between the fall of the Hephthalites and the coming of Islam, they were the merchants of Central Asia. For the Göktürks they matter for a narrower reason. The first text in history that mentions the Göktürks also mentions a Sogdian and the silk trade. The Göktürks wrote in the Sogdian script, and their earliest inscription is in the Sogdian language. A Sogdian was the envoy who carried the Göktürks to Constantinople. When the eastern khaganate fell in 630, the Chinese blamed the hu, that is the Sogdians, whom Ilig had trusted with everything. The Sogdian presence in the steppe is sometimes held to be older than the Göktürks. This account has the Sogdians come out of Gansu rather than out of Sogdiana. It treats the Göktürks as heirs to a relation between Sogdians and nomads that was commercial from the start.^[1] The Gansu origin is disputed. Sogdians were in Gansu, but only singly. The encounter that mattered took place in Sogdiana and not outside it. It gave the Göktürks their script, their chancery and their merchants.

Identity and attestation

The Sogdians are attested for more than fifteen centuries. The sources run from the inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings in the sixth century BC to the Arab geographers of the tenth century AD. These geographers record the irreversible decline of the Sogdian language and identity. The Sogdians afterwards melted into the mass of Islamic Iranian-speakers. This is why a people that founded Samarkand and Bukhara is so little known. With the monks of the Indo-Iranian borderlands, the Sogdians were the chief propagators of Buddhism in China in the second and third centuries. Four centuries later they carried the new religions of the west, Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity, to China and to the Göktürks. The first conversions of Turkic peoples to Islam took place in their commercial area north of the Syr Darya. The pilgrim Xuanzang crossed the whole region around 630. He drew the boundary of the people wider than the Zarafshan. From the town on the Suyab river to the country of Kesh, he wrote, the land is called Suli, and the people, the writing and the speech are called by the same name. In his view, Chach and Semirech’e were part of Sogdiana. He found the western merchants of all lands living together at Suyab and at Talas. He thought the Sogdians crafty, covetous and mean in their dress. Parent and child alike planned how to get wealth, and those who tilled the earth and those who sought profit were divided nearly in half.

The sources are of one kind. Almost all of them are external. A Buddhist monk’s biography or an Arabic dictionary notes that there were merchants at such a place and that they were Sogdians.^[1] The Sogdian documents that are themselves commercial can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There are no accounts, no laws and no prosopography. What can be written is therefore a map of the Sogdian presence and how it moved.^[1]

Beginnings of the network

Nothing shows Sogdian trade with the east in the Achaemenid period or at the time of Alexander. The Sogdian names for the Chinese, cyn, and for China, cynstn, the land of the Qin, reached Sogdiana through the peoples of the steppe and the Tarim basin. This happened at the end of the third or the beginning of the second century BC.^[2] The trade began with the Han embassies to the west. The Shiji complains that the envoys were sons of poor families. They treated the government’s goods as their own and bought cheap abroad to sell at a profit at home.^[3] The peoples of the west, for their part, made the Han envoys pay for food and mounts.^[3] The official history calls this theft and disrespect. In fact it was a form of trade on the margins of diplomacy. Sogdiana lay on the route from Dayuan to Parthia along which this trade ran.^[4]

The first Sogdian merchants in China came under diplomatic cover. In 11 BC Kangju, which by then held Sogdiana, sent a son to the Han court. The Protector General wrote that Kangju wanted to trade and that its words were a pretence.^[5] If Kangju then ruled Sogdiana, these embassies were probably conducted by Sogdian merchants. Long-range Sogdian commerce therefore began a few decades before the common era.^[6] By the early third century this commerce had grown far. In 227 the hu lords of the Yuezhi and of Kangju in Liangzhou, in the middle of Gansu, vied with each other to receive the army of the Wei. Sogdian merchants were then a political force more than three thousand kilometres from home.^[7]

The Ancient Letters, written about 313 and found in a watchtower west of Dunhuang, show the network itself.^[8] They show resident communities with women, children and their own structure in numerous towns, not caravans passing through.^[9] Nanai-vandak ran the business in Gansu for a principal in Samarkand, with agents at Jiuquan, Guzang and the towns further in.^[10] The Sogdians also went south. On the upper Indus below Gilgit they left more than 650 graffiti on the road to India between the third and the fifth century.^[11] The family of the monk Kang Senghui, a Sogdian of the third century, had lived in India for generations. His father went to Tonkin to trade.^[12]

Sogdiana before the Göktürks

The country the Göktürks took in 560 had been remade in the century before.^[1] The Hun invasions of the fourth century were no disaster for Sogdiana. After the invasions themselves, the Hunnic period was a time of rapid development, through additions of population and three generations of political stability.^[1] The Wei Shu records that the Xiongnu killed the king of Sute and took the country. It also records that in 457 a Xiongnu king named Huni, the third of his line, sat on the throne of Samarkand.^[1] These Xiongnu have been identified with the Kidarites. This dates their arrival in Sogdiana after 440, when Sogdian embassies to China break off in 441 and resume in 457.^[1] A different identification takes Sute for the country of the Alans north of the Black Sea. It makes these Xiongnu the Huns.^[13] Under the Kidarites, in the years 440 to 470, the citadel of Samarkand was raised on its platform of rammed earth. Walls were built and small planned towns founded, among them Panjikent, Paikent and Bukhara. Sogdiana was spared the wars that ravaged Bactria. At last it gained the ascendancy over its southern rival. The Kidarites also sent embassies to free Sogdian merchants imprisoned in China.

In 509 the Hephthalites took the country.^[1] No written source records the conquest.^[1] It is inferred from two things. In that year Hephthalite embassies suddenly replaced Sogdian ones at the Chinese courts. At Panjikent the walls and a temple were partly destroyed and immediately repaired, and a three-storey barracks for a permanent garrison was added to the outer wall.^[1] The Hephthalites were fabulously rich. They had killed the Persian king Peroz in 484. They had put his successor Kavad on his throne and back on it. For decades, at least to the beginning of the reign of Khosrow I, the Sasanians paid them a colossal tribute. On one occasion Peroz had sent as many silver coins as thirty mules could carry. Those coins are still found by the thousand in the markets of Afghanistan. The Sogdians were established at the heart of Hephthalite power and had simply changed masters. They spread that silver through an empire that at its height in 520 nominally ran from Merv to Turfan and Gandhara. Sasanian silver became the currency of all Central Asia, Gansu included, for close to two centuries. In it the Sogdian merchants found the capital that let them enlarge their enterprises. The Göktürk conquest fifty years later, it follows, was rapid and hardly seems to have caused any damage.^[1]

The century of Hephthalite rule shows also in how Sogdian leaders had themselves pictured. Sogdians buried in China in the last third of the sixth century lie under stone couches and sarcophagi with painted reliefs. They are Kang Ye in 571, An Jia in 579, Shi Jun in 580 and Yu Hong in 592, at Xi’an and Taiyuan.^[14] On Shi Jun’s sarcophagus a king in a yurt wears a winged crown. He has been identified as a Hephthalite ruler. The Sogdian leaders themselves also wear winged crowns. Yu Hong wears one on the panels of his sarcophagus. A figure of the banquets and the hunt, who is identified as Shi Jun, wears one. So does a dead man buried at Jiulongshan near Guyuan, in a gold-foil headdress of that shape.^[15] The triple-crescent crown, the second crown of the Hephthalite kings, is worn by two guardians on the gates of the tomb of Di Caoming at Jingbian. Di Caoming was buried in 579. His title Tianzhu of Xia is understood as that of a Zoroastrian priest, so the tomb is identified as a Sogdian one.^[16] On the view that joins these finds, Sogdian leaders in China chose the crowns of the conquerors of Central Asia. The crowns came to China, apart from Buddhist art, with Sogdian immigrants who stood under Hephthalite influence.^[17] Yu Hong’s own descent is argued from his second name Mupan, which transcribes the Sogdian Māxfarn, glory of the moon god Mākh. Those who doubt that he was a Sogdian question this argument.^[18]

Expansion into Chach and Semirech’e

The prosperity of the fifth century pushed the Sogdian area north. In the sixth and seventh centuries the oasis of Chach, the Tashkent oasis on the right bank of the middle Syr Darya, entered the Sogdian sphere. Coins of Chach are found at Panjikent, and Sogdian coins at Chach. The small lords of the oasis struck coins with legends entirely in Sogdian and the Sogdian title xwb, lord. One rare type bears the Göktürk title tudun. The aristocratic residences were built and decorated on Sogdian models. The Chinese of the seventh century took the merchants of Chach for Sogdians like any others. At Otrar, downstream, new methods of irrigation appeared in the sixth century. They came from Sogdiana or Khorezm and belong with the Göktürk empire.^[1] That empire unified these lands and set at Otrar the tudun in charge of Chach. Its needs set going a cycle of larger canals, more people and more towns.^[1]

The Sogdian mark was deeper still in Semirech’e, the land of the seven rivers, to the north-east. The Talas plain and the whole piedmont north of the Kirghiz Alatau as far as Issyk Kul owed their first urbanisation to the Sogdians in the fifth and sixth centuries. Here, unlike Chach, it was a real colonisation, an extension of sedentary and urban life to the north. A section of the History of Bukhara, taken from al-Nishapuri, gives the political reason for one such foundation. Narshakhī himself had not included this section. When the tyranny of Abrūī became unbearable, the landholders and the rich merchants of the Bukhara district fled to Turkistan and Taraz. They built a city they called Hamukat, after Hamuk, the great landholder who led them.^[19] Excavation at Suyab and Navaket shows towns growing up around castles built on the Sogdian model. The towns are strung along the piedmont between five hundred and a thousand metres, where grey soils and abundant water allowed wheat, vines and orchards. These colonies were not trading posts on a Silk Road. The large sites lie less than twelve kilometres apart, which no commercial technique of the age required.^[1] The choice of ground shows agricultural settlements founded by nobles making estates on virgin land. The merchants, whom Narshakhī’s text attests from the beginning, were their beneficiaries rather than their founders.^[1] The colonies doubled the Sogdian commercial area. They also set a refined urban culture, Iranian and Indian in its tastes, in direct contact with the steppe, with which it would merge.

Sogdians on the steppe before the Göktürks

The obvious hypothesis is that the Sogdians entered the steppe from Sogdiana, and it remains the stronger one. Against it stands the argument that the first contacts between Sogdians and Turkic-speakers took place much further east.^[1] On that argument the Sogdians gained their foothold among the nomads from their commercial bases in Gansu. The Ancient Letters, written probably in 313, already show them settled there.^[1] The evidence for Gansu is good and is set out below. What it shows is Sogdians scattered along a road, not the meeting of two peoples. The scale is the objection. A pedlar at Hohhot and a merchant envoy at Beshbalik are single men. Sogdiana was a country of cities, which the Göktürks conquered and then governed through its own men. The argument cites a precedent from the fifth century. In 490 the khan of the Gaoju, from his seat at Beshbalik, sent a hu merchant named Yuezhe to the Wei court to seek an accord against the Rouran.^[20] Yuezhe is a Sogdian name, Wātč, little wind, or possibly Warč, miracle. Near Hohhot in Inner Mongolia the body of a merchant was found still carrying his goods, Byzantine and Sasanian silver cups. A gold coin of Leo I dates his journey to the second half of the fifth century.^[1] Nothing proves he was a Sogdian, but his wares and his route through Gansu strongly suggest it.^[1] He shows what the Sogdian pedlar in the steppe would have been. He was a small trader carrying precious goods, who died alone and was not robbed.^[1] Sasanian coins of Kavad and Khosrow I found in the region are interpreted the same way. So are forty-one Sasanian coins in a stupa deposit of 481 at Dingxian south-west of Beijing. The same scholars ask whether it is a coincidence that the Göktürks borrowed from the Sogdians, among many words, those for debt and for coin.

Two things follow for the Göktürks. The presence of Sogdian merchants in the steppe began before the Göktürks arrived, at least in the fifth century. The Göktürks were heirs to an older relation between Sogdians and nomads that had been commercial from the beginning. Neither point reaches the great encounter. That encounter, on the best account, took place in Sogdiana after 560, when the Göktürks took the country and its cities together. The Göktürk ruling clan itself, it follows, came out of the same frontier world. The Sui Shu calls the ancestors of the Göktürks mixed hu of Pingliang, which lies between Gansu and Chang’an.^[21] The phrase places the imperial clan of the Ashina in the mixed milieu of the north-western frontier. Aboriginals, Xiongnu, Iranians, Indians and Chinese had mingled there for centuries. The names of all the earliest Göktürk khans are not Turkic.^[1] The debate on Göktürk origins takes up this question.

Sogdian communities in northern China

The Sogdian communities of northern China grew in the fifth and sixth centuries under the Northern Wei.^[22] After the defeat of the Northern Liang in 439, the Wei moved Sogdian merchants and craftsmen from Guzang, its capital, to their own capital Pingcheng.^[22] Under the Wei, as under the states that followed it, members of non-Chinese peoples, Sogdians among them, could rise for the first time to any notable degree.^[22] The sabao marks this rise. This office was the head of a Sogdian or other Central Asian community, and its title is the Sogdian s’rtp’w in Chinese dress.^[22] It first existed on the frontier. Under the Northern Qi, the Northern Zhou and the Sui it was set up in the capitals Ye and Chang’an as well. Before the Sui it was held mostly by Sogdians.^[23] The only known holders who were not Sogdians belonged to a family Di, a Sinicised name for the Turkic Töles or Gaoche.^[24] In the second half of the sixth century Sogdians also held military posts at the courts of the Northern Qi and Northern Zhou. Their gift for languages and negotiation made them diplomats.^[24]

The four tombs found since 1999 belong to this world. They are those of Yu Hong, An Jia, Shi Jun and Kang Ye.^[25] Three of the four men were sabao by their epitaphs. Kang Ye, who was not, is the one whose couch has no Zoroastrian scenes.^[26] Yu Hong came from a state called Yu in Central Asia whose place is unknown. The strong mark of Sogdian culture on him is beyond question.^[24] In Sogdiana the dead were exposed and their bones laid in ossuaries until the eighth century.^[27] In China the Sogdians buried the body, in house-shaped sarcophagi or on couches of stone. They used no wooden coffin, which the Chinese and the Xianbei could not do without.^[28] Some scholars derive these sarcophagi and couches not from Chinese burial custom but from the Northern Wei, in whose capitals they first appear.^[29] They regard the Sogdians as users of forms that suited their own beliefs, with a fire altar in the place where tombs of the north had a monster mask or a Buddhist wish-jewel.^[30] The Sogdians, they add, followed the burial customs of the Xianbei confederation that ruled the north, not those of the Han Chinese.^[31] Epitaphs show few marriages between Sogdians and Chinese before the end of the sixth century. They show none with the Xianbei imperial house. The children mostly kept Sogdian names. Shi Jun had no Chinese personal name at all.^[32]

In the Göktürk state

The first Göktürks in Chinese history come to the frontier to trade for silk. The Zhou Shu says that Bumin’s people first came to the border to trade for silk and floss and wished to open relations with China.^[33] In 545 Yuwen Tai sent An Nuopantuo, a hu of Jiuquan, to the Göktürks. They congratulated one another that the envoy of a great state had come.^[33] In 546 Bumin sent an envoy with the products of his land.^[33] The name An Nuopantuo, pronounced Nakbanda in the Chinese of the time, is the Sogdian Anāhitā-banda, servant of Anāhitā. Jiuquan in Gansu is a place where the Ancient Letters already show a Sogdian resident. The very first text that mentions the Göktürks mentions a Sogdian and the silk trade.

With the conquest of Sogdiana in 560 a genuine fusion began.^[1] Several things show it. A king of Panjikent at the end of the seventh century was a Göktürk. His successor Dēwāštīč, Iranian in name, was of Göktürk descent by the genealogy in the History of Nishapur.^[1] The only Sogdian marriage contract preserved unites a Göktürk and a noble Sogdian woman.^[1] Tombs at Krasnaya Rechka in Semirech’e hold couples and horses buried together after the Göktürk manner. The wooden frieze of Kuyruk-tobe carries figures in Göktürk dress and headgear.^[1] In the great painting of Afrasiab at Samarkand, Göktürk warriors sit in a circle at the feet of a king while Chinese envoys and Sogdian nobles approach in procession.^[1] The cities and the countryside stayed Iranian-speaking. In the mountains of Chach, in Tukharistan and in Semirech’e, however, the Göktürk element became ethnically important while remaining culturally under Sogdian domination. The sixth and seventh centuries created a mixed civilisation, at least in the ruling strata.

The chief Sogdian gift to the Göktürks was writing. The language that carried it has its own article. The Sogdian alphabet, adapted step by step to Turkic sounds, was used through the whole history of the Göktürks and then the Uyghur empires to write Turkic.^[1] The exception was a rather brief period of national xenophobic reaction among the elites at the beginning of the eighth century, when the runic alphabet was used.^[1] The Mongol and Manchu scripts descend from the Sogdian alphabet today.^[1] The earliest texts of the Göktürk empire are in the Sogdian language. They begin in the last quarter of the sixth century with the Bugut inscription, the oldest known. The Zhou Shu says of the Göktürks at the very beginning of their state that their writing resembles that of the hu.^[33] When the Göktürk embassy of 568 reached Constantinople, its letter was in Scythian letters and was carried by a Sogdian. The same scholars understand this as the Sogdian alphabet.^[1] With writing came Buddhism. Göktürk Buddhism was in its oldest layer under Sogdian and Chinese influence. The Bugut inscription shows the religion present under the first khans, and Maniakh bore a Buddhist name.

Maniakh’s family shows how deep the Sogdians sat in the Göktürk hierarchy. His son, still a boy, was given his father’s title and the second rank in the next Göktürk embassy to the Romans. The reason, Menander says, was that the father had been most dear and loyal to the yabgu.^[34] The son was raised at Istemi’s court. This Sogdian family possessed rank and hereditary title in the Göktürk order when the empire had only just been created.^[1] The inscriptions contain foreign words that are identified as Sogdian. They are above all titles, among them hatun, queen, čabıš, a military rank, and čor, a title. They show Sogdians at work inside the realm and in charge of duties in its administration.^[35] Sogdians also conducted the Göktürk embassies to Iran and Byzantium.^[35] The dominance was not confined to the west. At the beginning of the seventh century the Sui minister Pei Ju told his emperor that the Göktürks were honest and simple by nature and could be set against one another. Many hu lived among them, he said. They were all cruel and perspicacious in the highest degree, and they instructed and guided the Göktürks. The Jiu Tangshu blames the fall of the eastern khaganate in 630 on the same people. Ilig entrusted everything to the various hu and put his own people at a distance.^[36] The hu are grasping and presumptuous and by nature uncertain and changeable. As a result the laws were multiplied and the army put in motion year after year. The people resented it, and the tribes deserted.^[36] An Suijia, the lover of a khan’s Chinese wife at the end of the sixth century, is called a hu man in the texts. A tribe of hu is listed in the Xin Tangshu on the same footing as the other tribes of the empire. In the first half of the seventh century the Göktürks in Gaochang had officials for the supervision and taxation of trade. The Kül Tegin inscription names the city-folk of Bukhara among the mourners of 732.^[37] Bilge Khan told his people that if they stayed in the Ötüken forest and sent out caravans and convoys they would have no misfortune.

Silk trade

The trade that made the Sogdians was not the pedlar’s. The account of Menander Protector belongs in the context of the Chinese wars. Under Mukan and for fifteen years after him, the Göktürks took part in the war between the Zhou and the Qi, serving both sides.^[1] Each side paid them a hundred thousand pieces of silk a year for their neutrality or their services, until the two dynasties had emptied their treasuries.^[1] Menander says that as the power of the Göktürks grew, the Sogdians, formerly subjects of the Hephthalites and now of the Göktürks, asked their king to send an embassy to the Persians. They wished to travel there and sell raw silk to the Medes.^[34] Sizabul, that is Istemi, agreed and sent Sogdian envoys under Maniakh.^[34] Maniakh proposed to sell silk in Persia and then, when that failed, in Byzantium. This was the silk the Chinese were paying at exactly that moment. The Sogdians of the empire proposed to the Göktürk princes to double the profit of the Chinese ransom by selling the unused surplus. The whole western development of the Sogdian network came out of this capture of Göktürk silk. The silk was delivered free of charge as far as northern Central Asia. The payments lasted some thirty years, until the Sui ended them. The frontier markets opened for the Göktürks in 588 mark the change.

At the Persian court the Sogdians asked leave to sell without hindrance. Khosrow was unwilling to give these men free access to Persia. He put them off day after day and took counsel.^[34] On the advice of the Hephthalite Katulph, he bought the silk at a fair price and burned it before the envoys’ eyes. He would thus not be held to have done an injustice, and it would be clear that he did not wish to use raw silk from the Göktürks.^[34] This was frontier policy and high politics rather than a blockade. The Sasanians controlled trade by permits at the frontier towns and had a merchant class of their own to protect. The Sogdians were probably confined to Merv or the old royal road to Holwan.^[1] The silk was refused because it was the fruit and symbol of the Chinese tribute to the new enemy, the Göktürks, after the common victory over the Hephthalites.^[1] Maniakh then advised Istemi to seek the friendship of the Romans, who used more silk than anyone. He went himself, through the Caucasus, to Constantinople, and came back with Zemarchos.^[34] Gregory of Tours records that in 571 an Armenian embassy brought a great quantity of silk thread to Constantinople. This silk was the fruit of the exchanges through the Caucasus. The embassy of Valentinos in 575 or 576 took a hundred and six Göktürks home with it. They had been gathered at Constantinople from the embassies of a decade. Relations had soured at that time, and the Göktürks threatened the Crimea.^[34] The project was planned with unusual precision. At several thousand kilometres’ distance, Maniakh identified the Greek empire as the chief western consumer and silk as one of the few goods worth the carriage.^[1] He proposed to send the surplus to the other end of the continent when the Chinese payments were only a few years old.^[1] Silks of the type called Zandanījī, after a village near Bukhara, have been found on the western passes of the Caucasus at Moshchevaya Balka. They lay together with a Chinese invoice on paper and a fragment of a sutra. Whether the Zandanījī silks were woven in Sogdiana or are Chinese copies of Iranian designs is disputed. For the route it does not matter, since they passed through Central Asia.

Horse trade of the Ordos

The other great trade of the Göktürks was horses. It ranked after military service and furs. In 642 one of the leaders of the western Göktürks sent thirty-eight thousand marten pelts to the Tang court. In 553 fifty thousand horses went to the Western Wei. In 643 the Xueyantuo sent fifty thousand with other animals to the Tang. The Chinese army drew its mounts from the Göktürks from the sixth century to the eighth. The Tang built the large cavalry the Sui had lacked. They went from five thousand horses at the accession in 618 to more than seven hundred thousand in the middle of the century. The region that lived by this trade was the Ordos, the only grassy steppe south of the Great Wall. At Guyuan, on the road from Gansu to the capital, the tombs of two Sogdian families named Shi, that is from Kesh, were excavated between 1982 and 1987. They are the only family group of Central Asian burials yet scientifically excavated in China. The line runs from a great-grandfather and grandfather who had been sabao, caravan leaders, in their country of origin, to Shi Shewu, who served the Sui and died in 610. It continues with his son Shi Hedan, the first official interpreter known at the Tang court, who died in 669 at eighty-six. A nephew and a kinsman managed imperial stud farms and died in 666 and 678. The dead had Sasanian silver and imitation Byzantine gold coins in their mouths, and a Pahlavi seal. After five generations in China the family still married within the Sogdian milieu. It is the counterpart, in Chinese service, of the Sogdian clans of the Göktürk empire.^[1] No firm opposition between turkicised and sinicised Sogdians will hold. The situation was fluid, and all belonged to one milieu at the intersection of Göktürks and Chinese.^[1]

North of Guyuan, in the bend of the Yellow River, the Chinese of the seventh and eighth centuries spoke of a hu park. In 679 they organised its Sogdo-Göktürk settlements as the six hu counties. Their origin lies in the surrender of Sogdians of high rank in the Göktürk state after 630. Kang Sumi came over, bringing the last Sui princes who had taken refuge with the Göktürks, and was made governor in the Ordos. An Tuhan surrendered with five thousand men and was made prefect of a county. When the six counties revolted in 721, all their leaders bore Sogdian names. Other Sogdians in the Chinese army put the revolt down. The Göktürk inscriptions call the same region the Sogdians of the six districts, altï čub sogdak. The counties lived by breeding horses for the Tang army. In 714 the court tried to organise a large purchase there. In 727 a whole system of horse markets was set up in the Ordos. The annual fairs turned over several hundred thousand pieces of silk. The six horses of Taizong, sculpted and sung for their part in the founding battles of the Tang, bore the Sogdian name Cherpādh, quadrupeds.

An Lushan and the reaction against the Sogdians

The rebellion of An Lushan shows what the Turco-Sogdian milieu of the north had become. An Lushan was born in 703 to a Sogdian officer in the Göktürk armies and a mother of the Göktürk clan of the Ashide. His name is the Sogdian Rōxšan, the luminous. The family probably took refuge in China after 716. He worked in the markets of the military towns of the north-east and is said to have been a commercial interpreter. He rose through the Khitan wars to command every army of the Chinese north-east. He revolted in December 755, took the capital in July 756, and was killed by his son in January 757. The Tang retook Chang’an and Luoyang with Uyghur help. The rebellion was put down only in January 763. The rebellion had ruined the dynasty, which never again imposed a centralised state. It cost the dynasty the Tarim and Turkistan, which went to the Tibetans and the Uyghurs. The rebellion had a precise cultural identity. Its officers were hu of mixed Iranian and Göktürk parentage, An Lushan and his successor Shi Siming among them.^[1] It drew for eight or nine years on the Sogdian merchant networks of the north. The History of An Lushan describes these networks bringing him foreign goods worth a million a year and selling silks and gilded purses in the districts to build his war chest.^[1] Its cavalry bore the Sogdian title čākar. Shi Siming, in his tomb, styled himself at once emperor of China and Sogdian prince, Emperor Jamūk, the jewel.^[1] In 753 An Lushan told the governor Geshu Han, whose father was a Göktürk and mother a hu, that their families were identical and asked why they should not be friends.

The Chinese reaction was brutal. As the imperial troops retook the cities, they ordered the massacre of the hu. At Beijing the Jie hu were exterminated, small children were thrown in the air and caught on spears, and many with large noses were killed in error. Tang poetry had been xenophile before. It now turned xenophobe. Sogdian families changed their names. The Baoyu family changed from An to Li in 756, for shame of sharing An Lushan’s surname. Others claimed descent from Guiji in the far south, which was also the forgotten old name of a district near Dunhuang. Within a generation the Sogdians disappear from the sources.

Under the Uyghurs

What saved the Sogdians of China was the Uyghur khan. The trilingual inscription of Karabalghasun records his conversion to Manichaeism at Luoyang in 762 and 763.^[1] It was the last-ditch effort of communities at bay. Manichaean Sogdians secured the protection of the principal military power of northern China for their coreligionists and compatriots, and the Chinese ended the xenophobic policy at once.^[1] From then on the Uyghurs protected the hu in China. As soon as their power faded in 840, the persecutions resumed.^[1] The Uyghurs, new masters of the steppe since 744, needed a model on which to organise their power that was not the Chinese one. They took the Sogdian model: not only the religion but the script, a large part of the vocabulary and the urban pattern.^[38] The Sogdian influence on the Uyghurs was greater even than on the Göktürks. The Shine-usu inscription has Bayan Chor order the Sogdians and the Chinese to build Bay Balïq on the Selenga. On the north face of the Tariat stele, line 6 puts one man in charge of affairs of the Chinese and the Sogdians.^[39] The fusion had its reverses. Between 779 and 789 a party hostile to foreign importations took power under Dun Mohe. According to the Jiu Tangshu, he killed the khan Mouyu together with the Sogdians who had urged him to invade China, two thousand people in all.^[40] The Sogdians and Manichaeism recovered. They were part of the great horse-for-silk trade between the Uyghur and Chinese empires until the Kirghiz destroyed the khaganate in 840. When the Uyghurs left the steppe for Gansu and the Turfan oasis and founded the kingdom of Qocho, the Sogdians went on playing their part in its cultural development.^[35]

Under the caliphate

The Arabs knew the Sogdians first as creditors. When an Arab army set out from Merv against Bukhara in 699, its commander went into debt with the Sogdians and their merchants. A lieutenant who then stayed at home was put in prison by his creditors.^[41] Between 705 and 715 Qutayba ibn Muslim conquered Sogdiana, Khorezm, Chach and Ferghana. In 712 he took Samarkand by a ruse.^[42] For thirty years the Sogdian nobles, allied with the Türgesh, fought back. They drove the Arabs from the whole country and carried the war across the Oxus. The last Umayyad governor, Nasr ibn Sayyar, finally stabilised the front between Samarkand and Ustrushana.^[42] The last king of Sogdiana to resist was Dēwāštīč of Panjikent, who died in 722.^[43]

The Sogdian nobility reached its military height under the caliphs al-Ma’mun and al-Mu’tasim. Sogdian military elites formed an important part of the army at Baghdad. This army was organised on the Sogdian model of the ruler’s bodyguard, the chakar.^[44] In the campaign against Babak in 835–837 the commander of the caliph’s armies was Afshin, heir to the throne of Ustrushana. The Bukhar Khuda led the troops of Transoxiana under him.^[44] At Samarra, the geographers of the next century say, the soldiers were often Turks but the officers were Sogdians.^[44] The height did not last. Al-Mu’tasim preferred Turkic slaves bought in Transoxiana and had Afshin put to death. In the second half of the ninth century the dihqans, the landed nobility, went into decline.^[44] Of the old families only the Samanids rose, less as Iranian nobles than as the caliphate’s representatives in Transoxiana.^[44]

End of the network

In the tenth century the Sogdian network came apart from both ends. On the road from Central Asia to the Volga the only merchants named are Khorezmians. They replaced the Sogdians there between the first third and the end of the ninth century.^[45] What remained to the Sogdians of the west was the trade in Turkic slaves. Sebüktegin, the founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty, was carried off as a child by the Tukhsi and sold to a slave merchant of Chach. Many Turkic soldiers of the Abbasids, the Samanids and the Ghaznavids must have shared his fate.^[46] The trade in slaves was probably one of the last activities of the Sogdians.^[47]

In the east the Sogdians turned into Uyghurs. The Uyghur network that followed the Sogdian one after 840 was built on Sogdian foundations. Of 53 Uyghur envoys to China between 907 and 960, 14 bore Sogdian family names.^[48] The turkicisation ran through marriage. Bilingual scribes wrote Sogdian Nestorian texts while thinking more and more in Turkic. One group of business letters mixes the two languages so closely that its editors called it Turco-Sogdian.^[48] Sogdian script was still written in the oasis of Turfan. The manuscripts in it are Buddhist and Manichaean in content, include fragments in Turkic, and in places render Chinese in Sogdian letters.^[49]

In Semirech’e the Sogdians lasted longest. Graffiti in the gorges south of the Talas are in the Sogdian language and a late Sogdian script but carry Turkic names. The last is dated February or March 1026.^[50] Mahmud al-Kashgari, writing in the 1070s, says that the people of Balasaghun, Taraz and Isfijab spoke both Sogdian and Turkic. He describes the Soghdaq settled at Balasaghun as people from Sogd whose dress and manners were those of the Turks.^[51] Sogdian was probably spoken in Argu into the twelfth century. In Sogdiana itself the last urban speakers were born perhaps in the first third of the tenth.^[52]

Wine and tribute goods

Samarkand, which the Chinese called Kang, was known at the Tang court for wine and for rare goods. The Tang huiyao says of its people that grape wine was common among them. The Xin Tang Shu says that they loved wine and song and dance in the roads.^[53]^[54] Kang sent the court gold and silver peaches, which the emperor ordered planted in the palace gardens. The Tang huiyao puts the gift in the eleventh month of 635, and the Cefu yuangui in 637.^[55] In the first years of the Kaiyuan period, after 713, Kang sent coats of mail, cups of rock crystal, agate bottles, ostrich eggs, dwarfs and dancing women of Khwarezm. It also sent a ware the text calls yuenuo.^[56]^[57] In the Zhenguan period (627 to 649) a leader of the people of Kang, Kang Yandian, settled with other hu in the old country of Shanshan south of Lop Nor. One of the towns he built was called the Town of the Grape, because he planted vines within its walls.^[58]^[59]

Organisation of the trade

Sogdian trade was a trade of camels, horses, donkeys and mules. Tang statuettes show Sogdian merchants in their characteristic dress on laden camels. Many of the figures are grooms bringing horses and camels to China. Northern Sogdiana bred camels, of which the Chinese took large numbers in the raid on Chach in 751. There were no Sogdian caravanserais. No building of that plan in Sogdiana can be dated before Islam, and the Sogdian word for inn was borrowed from Chinese.^[1] On their own land the Sogdians lodged travellers in the oversized courtyards of the castles of the nobility. This came from an aristocratic duty of hospitality, which Ibn Hawqal still found in Transoxiana in the tenth century and to which the Muslim caravanserai later gave an architectural form.^[1] In the steppe the caravans used tents. The account of Tamim ibn Bahr’s embassy to the Uyghurs in 821 mentions tents set up along the postal road between Semirech’e and Mongolia to lodge couriers and travellers, with no permanent building. The Sogdians did little to improve their roads. The cisterns that shortened the crossing of the Hungry Steppe north of Samarkand and the works on the Merv road date from the ninth century.^[1] It is a question whether the golden age of Sogdian trade, from 550 to 750, rested on a windfall that was more political than commercial, the massive transfer of Chinese silk to the west.^[1]

Significance

The Sogdians are the people through whom the Göktürk state spoke and wrote, traded and negotiated. Their networks carried it to Persia, Byzantium and the Chinese capitals.^[1] The Turco-Sogdian milieux played a key role in all the commerce between China and its nomad neighbours, and in political life as well. Their apogee was the revolt of An Lushan. Their fall from it was delayed only by the conversion of the Uyghur khan.^[1] Two limits are kept. The Chinese word hu covers more than Sogdians, and where a text says hu the word stands untranslated. The same scholars argue from the chancellery language and the loanwords that most of these hu were Sogdians. That is an argument, not a finding. The accounts of Menander, Pei Ju, the Jiu Tangshu and Xuanzang stand here as the literature quotes them.

References

^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap aq ar as at au av aw ax ay de la Vaissière 2005a
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 24
^ a b Shiji, juan 123
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 32
^ Han Shu, juan 96
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 38
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 61
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 45–46
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 60
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 48
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 79
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 72
^ 内田吟風 1971, p. 254-255
^ Kageyama 2007, p. 11
^ Kageyama 2007, p. 12-13
^ Kageyama 2007, p. 13
^ Kageyama 2007, p. 13-14
^ Kageyama 2007, p. 15
^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 6-7
^ Wei Shu, juan 103
^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ a b c d Müller 2008, p. 122
^ Müller 2008, p. 122–123
^ a b c Müller 2008, p. 123
^ Müller 2008, p. 117
^ Müller 2008, p. 123, 134
^ Müller 2008, p. 128
^ Müller 2008, p. 128, 129
^ Müller 2008, p. 134–139
^ Müller 2008, p. 130–131
^ Müller 2008, p. 140
^ Müller 2008, p. 126
^ a b c d Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ a b c d e f g Menander Protector
^ a b c Özertural 2013, p. 93
^ a b Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
^ Kül Tegin inscription
^ Özertural 2013, p. 94
^ Aydın 2013, p. 18
^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
^ Tabari; de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 274
^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 266
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 272
^ a b c d e de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 285
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 294
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 304
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 305
^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 326
^ von Le Coq 1913, p. 4
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 329
^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 328
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 330
^ Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), juan 99; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 221
^ Laufer 1919, p. 221
^ Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), juan 99; Cefu yuangui, juan 970
^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 221
^ Laufer 1919, p. 494
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 123
^ Laufer 1919, p. 222

Sources

Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
Menander Protector
Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194, 195
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215, 221 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Wei Shu, juan 103
Bugut inscription
Kül Tegin inscription
Shiji, juan 123
Han Shu, juan 96 (after Shiji)
Sogdian Ancient Letters
Sogdian inscriptions of the upper Indus
Tabari
Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk
Narshakhī, History of Bukhara
Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), juan 99
Cefu yuangui, juan 970 (after Tongdian and Jiu Tangshu)

Literature

Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
Uchida Ginpū 内田吟風, 魏書西域傳原文考釋（中） (1971)
Etsuko Kageyama, The Winged Crown and the Triple-crescent Crown in the Sogdian Funerary Monuments from China: Their Relation to the Hephthalite Occupation of Central Asia (2007)
Richard N. Frye (trans.), The History of Bukhara. Translated from a Persian Abridgment of the Arabic Original by Narshakhi (1954)
Shing Müller, Sogdier in China um 600 n. Chr. Archäologische Zeugnisse eines Lebens zwischen Assimilation und Identitätsbewahrung (2008)
Zekine Özertural, Mitteliranische Einflüsse auf die manichäisch-türkische Wortbildung (2013)
Albert von Le Coq, Chotscho. Facsimile-Wiedergaben der wichtigeren Funde der ersten Königlich Preussischen Expedition nach Turfan in Ost-Turkistan (1913)
Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica. Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (1919)
Erhan Aydın, Tariat Yazıtı’nın kuzey yüzünün 5. satırı üzerine yeni okuma ve anlamlandırma önerileri (2013)