Rouran epochGöktürk epochUyghur epochKirghiz epoch
RouranFirst GöktürkTang ruleSecond GöktürkUyghurKirghizHunsWestern GöktürkTürgeshKarlukKhazar
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The Mount Mugh documents are the archive of Dēwāštīč, the lord of Panjikent who called himself king of Sogdiana. They were found in 1933 on Mount Mugh in Tajikistan.[1] They are the principal body of Sogdian documents from eighth-century Sogdiana.[1] Most of them are letters on the struggle against the Arabs and on the running of Dēwāštīč’s estates. A few are contracts, for a marriage or the purchase of a burial plot.[1]

The word for merchant occurs once in the whole corpus. Document A 9 is a report to Dēwāštīč on the surrender of Khujand, on the border between Ustrushana and Ferghana. It says: “This is the news: Khujand is at an end, and the whole people has gone out on trust of the amir, and whatever (there were) of noblemen, of merchants, and of workmen, 14 000 (altogether), they have evacuated.”[2] The line is the Sogdian witness, from inside Sogdiana, to a class of merchants. Foreign observers from Chang’an to Baghdad describe this class from outside.[3] The Arabic account of the same surrender in 722 says that the nobles and the merchants were separated. Only the nobles were put to death.[1]

The archive is not wholly Sogdian. A study of runiform finds in Uzbekistan counts 76 documents from Mount Mugh from the time of Dēwāštīč. Of these, 74 are Sogdian, one is Arabic and one is Turkic.[4] The Turkic text is written on leather in runiform script. It was published in 1951.[5] If that is right, it is a runiform text on leather from the decade after 710.

References

  1. ^ a b c d de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 161
  2. ^ Mount Mugh documents
  3. ^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 162
  4. ^ Sadıkov 2000, p. 305
  5. ^ Sadıkov 2000, p. 304–305

Sources

Literature

  • Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
  • Kasımcan Sadıkov, Özbekistan'da Bulunan Göktürk Harfli Yeni Metinler (2000)

Articles resting on this source 2

Dēwāštīč · Panjikent

Related

What links here3

Persons
Dēwāštīč
Places
Panjikent
Languages
The Old Turkic script

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Mount Mugh documents.” Turkic Atlas, revised 4 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/mount-mugh-documents/

Last revised: 4 November 2026