Bactria

Bactria is the country south of the Oxus, around Balkh, on the road that runs from Transoxiana over the Hindu Kush to India. In the sources of the sixth century and after it is called Tokharistan.^[1]

It was the southern half of the Hephthalite realm. The partition on the Oxus assigned it to Persia.^[2] The assignment did not hold. In the war of 588 the Göktürks took its cities. Bahram Chobin’s counter-campaign the following year had to retake them.^[3]

The country was known to the Chinese long before the Göktürks, as Daxia. In his report to the emperor, as the Shiji gives it, Zhang Qian says that in Daxia he saw bamboo staves of Qiong and cloth of Shu.^[4] The people told him that their merchants had bought both in India. He concluded that India could not lie far from Shu.^[4] Goods of Sichuan thus reached Bactria by way of India, on a road that ran from Sichuan through Yunnan to north-eastern India.^[5] Strabo gives Bactriana the same produce as Aria, a country as fertile as Margiana, except the olive.^[6]

Under the western Göktürks the land south of the Iron Gate had a Göktürk prince with the rank of shad. Some scholars place him at Huo, near Kunduz, in 630, as governor of all the small kingdoms south of the Iron Gate. His son took the title of yabgu in 643 or 644.^[7]

References

^ Kurbanov 2010
^ Yavuz 2025
^ Tabari
^ a b Shiji, juan 123
^ Laufer 1919, p. 535
^ Laufer 1919, p. 223
^ Markwart 1938, p. 44–45

Sources

Literature

Aydogdy Kurbanov, The Hephthalites: Archaeological and Historical Analysis (2010)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Stanislas Julien, Mémoires sur les contrées occidentales (1857–1858)
Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica. Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (1919)
Josef Markwart, Wehrot und Arang. Untersuchungen zur mythischen und geschichtlichen Landeskunde von Ostiran (1938)