An Nuopantuo

An Nuopantuo is the first named person in the history of the Göktürks who was not a Göktürk. The Zhou Shu says that Bumin’s people first came to the Chinese frontier to buy silk and floss. They wished to open relations with China.^[1] In the eleventh year of Datong, 545, Yuwen Tai sent An Nuopantuo, a hu of Jiuquan, as envoy to the Göktürks.^[1] The Göktürks congratulated one another. They said that a great state’s envoy had come and their own would flourish. In the following year Bumin sent an envoy with the products of his land.^[1] The embassy has its own article.

Two things follow from the name.^[2] It was pronounced Nakbanda in the Chinese of the time. That is the Sogdian Anāhitā-banda, servant of Anāhitā, a name attested in Sogdian onomastics. The family name An by itself might still have meant a man of Merv or an Indo-Parthian. The transcription proves him a Sogdian. Jiuquan is in Gansu, where the Ancient Letters of the fourth century already place a Sogdian resident. The first text in history that mentions the Göktürks therefore mentions a Sogdian and the silk trade. The same literature takes the choice of envoy as evidence that the Sogdians of Gansu had known the nomads long before the Göktürk state existed. Nothing else is recorded of him.