Sogdiana

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

Sogdiana is the country of the Sogdians. It consists of the fertile valleys, ringed by deserts, between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. Its heart is the valley of the Zarafshan in present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and its cities are Samarkand and Bukhara. Around 630 the pilgrim Xuanzang drew the country wider. He took it from the Suyab river in Semirech’e to Kesh south of Samarkand, and gave land, people, writing and speech one name, Suli. The Chinese dynastic histories call it Sute. The Wei Shu sets it west of the Pamirs, on an extensive swamp north-west of Kangju, and equates it with the Yancai of older texts.

Before the Göktürks

The country the Göktürks took had been rebuilt in the century before them. Against the common view, the Hun invasions were followed not by ruin but by rapid development. Refugees from the Syr Darya merged with the Sogdians. The irrigation may have been repaired in the calm of the early fifth century. New principalities appeared, and from 440 to 470 a strong political power founded towns and raised walls.^[1] That power may have been the Kidarites. They would then be the same as the Xiongnu of the Wei Shu, who killed the king and took the country, and whose third ruler, Huni, held Samarkand in 457. The entry may instead refer to the Alans north of the Black Sea and the Huns.^[2] The founders of the new towns came from Bactria and brought its techniques and people with them. They built small planned towns such as Panjikent, Paikent and Bukhara. They raised the citadel of Samarkand on a platform of rammed earth four metres thick.^[1] The wars of Kidarites, Hephthalites and Sasanians ravaged Bactria but spared Sogdiana. For the first time Sogdiana gained the ascendancy over its southern rival, which in antiquity had been the centre of Central Asian trade.^[1] Its art, its town planning and even its place-names followed Bactrian models. Its urban elites inherited the tastes of India and the Kushans.

In 509 the Hephthalites took Sogdiana. No written record says so. The sign is the abrupt replacement of Sogdian embassies at the Chinese court by Hephthalite ones. At Panjikent the walls and a temple were partly destroyed and at once repaired. A barracks for a permanent garrison was added. Hephthalite silver was the tribute of the Sasanian kings from the death of Peroz in 484. It flowed through the country and became the money of Central Asia for two centuries. In the century before the Göktürk conquest, the sources available record few years of war in Sogdiana.

The paintings offer another interpretation of the Hephthalite century. Most wall paintings of Panjikent date from the second half of the seventh century to the first half of the eighth. Those of the sixth century, when the Hephthalites and the western Göktürks held the country, are few.^[3] On this interpretation the Hephthalites did not ruin the Sogdian cities but helped to rebuild them. The population grew and new cities rose in the first half of the sixth century. This prepared the flowering of the seventh.^[3] This interpretation finds Indian elements brought in by the Kidarites and the Hephthalites, who united the lands on both sides of the Hindu Kush. A goddess of the sixth century in the north chapel of Temple II at Panjikent shows Hindu influence. The head of the hero Rustam in a painting of about 740 is deformed in the way of the royal portraits on Hephthalite coins. The Hephthalites practised cranial deformation.^[4]

The Hephthalite kings wore a winged crown, and it became the royal crown of Sogdiana. A fragment of a wall painting of the early eighth century in the palace of Dēwāštīč at Panjikent shows a winged crown being tied to a head. Some scholars take the paintings of that hall to show the siege of Samarkand by the Arabs in 712 and the coronation of Dēwāštīč as king of Sogdiana.^[5] A painting of the first half of the eighth century in a merchant’s house shows the king of the demons. He wears a crown of a skull between two hands, made by changing the parts of the winged crown. This suggests that the winged crown was the stereotype of the royal crown.^[5] Sogdian leaders seem to have taken it up in the sixth century after the Hephthalite kings. The evidence is that some of the Sogdians buried in China in the last third of that century wear it on their sarcophagi.^[5]

Under the Göktürks

Sogdiana was a country of merchant cities without an army. Each city had its own king. The country stood under Hephthalite overlordship and garrison, and the largest garrison was at Bukhara. Around 560 Istemi took it, acting in concert with Khosrow I, who took the country west of the Amu Darya.^[6] Some scholars hold that the Göktürks at first took only the Hephthalite lands north of the Iron Gate, between 563 and 568. The report of Zemarchos, they argue, shows them holding Sogdiana alone.^[7] The decisive fight of the Göktürk–Hephthalite war was the battle of Bukhara. Its year is disputed. The Göktürk conquest was rapid and almost without damage. From it dates a genuine fusion of Sogdians and Göktürks. By the end of the seventh century there were Göktürk kings at Panjikent. A Göktürk married a noble Sogdian woman in the one marriage contract preserved. In the great painting of Afrasiab at Samarkand, Göktürk warriors sit at the feet of the king while Chinese envoys and Sogdian nobles approach.^[1] Menander says that the Sogdians, formerly subjects of the Hephthalites and now of the Göktürks, asked their king for leave to sell silk in Persia. This is the beginning of Maniakh’s story.^[8] In these centuries the Sogdian area itself moved north, to Chach and to the colonies of Semirech’e around Suyab and Talas.

The Sui Shu says that the king of Kang had for his wife a daughter of the Göktürk khagan Tardu. It adds that the king of An, Bukhara, was married to a daughter of the king of Kang.^[9]^[10]

The Göktürks did not always hold the country. The cities of Sogdiana and Bactria were lost to Persia in the first great Göktürk–Persian war of 588. They returned to Göktürk rule. After 659 Central Asia was formally under Chinese control. Between 715 and 740 the Türgesh dominated the west. They lost Sogdiana to the Arab armies. The Kül Tegin inscription of 732 still names the city-folk of Bukhara among the mourners.^[11] Tonyukuk boasted of the camels he brought back from a raid on Sogdiana.

Vines and wine

Vine and wine were everyday goods of the Sogdian towns. The Sui Shu says of Kang that its people made much grape wine. Rich families laid up a thousand shi of it, which kept for years.^[9] The Tang Huiyao says of its customs that there is much grape wine.^[12] A Sogdian leader of Kang, Kang Yandian, founded a colony south of the Lop Nor in the Zhenguan era, between 627 and 649. One of its towns was called Town of the Grape, because he planted vines inside it.^[13]^[14]

Kang sent the Tang court goods that show the reach of the country. In 647 it offered yellow peaches as large as goose eggs and golden in colour. They were also called gold peaches.^[15] At the beginning of the Kaiyuan era, from 713, it sent coats of mail, cups of rock crystal, agate bottles, ostrich eggs, dwarfs and dancing girls.^[16]^[17]

Roads and hospitality

Sogdiana had no caravanserais before Islam. Travellers were lodged in the great courtyards of the nobles’ castles, as at Zaamin, where the roads to Chach and to Ferghana parted.^[1] The duty of hospitality behind this custom was still alive when Ibn Hawqal wrote in the tenth century. According to him, no gathering-place or waterpoint in Transoxiana lacked a hospice, and the rich competed to ruin themselves in building them.^[1] The roads themselves were little improved. The cisterns across the Hungry Steppe and the works on the Merv road belong to the ninth century.

The Sogdians founded Samarkand and Bukhara. They then vanished into the Iranian-speaking population of the Islamic world. By the tenth century the Arab geographers record the decline of their language. Al-Bīrūnī, al-Fārābī, Avicenna and al-Khwārizmī were all educated in Sogdiana or in neighbouring Khorezm.

References

^ a b c d e f de la Vaissière 2005a
^ 内田吟風 1971, p. 254-255
^ a b Kageyama 2007, p. 11
^ Kageyama 2007, p. 11-12
^ a b c Kageyama 2007, p. 13
^ Yavuz 2025, p. 273
^ Markwart 1938, p. 148
^ Menander Protector
^ a b Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 83
^ Markwart 1938, p. 151
^ Kül Tegin inscription
^ Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), juan 99
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 123
^ Laufer 1919, p. 222
^ Cefu yuangui, juan 970
^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 221
^ Chavannes 1903, p. 136

Sources

Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 83, 84
Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Menander Protector
Kül Tegin inscription
Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), juan 99
Cefu yuangui, juan 970 (after Tongdian and Jiu Tangshu)
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 221 (after 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)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
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)
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)
Édouard Chavannes, Documents sur les Tou-Kiue (Turcs) occidentaux (1903)