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RouranFirst GöktürkTang ruleSecond GöktürkUyghurKirghizHunsWestern GöktürkTürgeshKarlukKhazar
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The Sogdian inscriptions of the upper Indus are graffiti that Sogdian travellers cut into the rocks of the Indus valley below Gilgit on their way to India.[1] There are more than 650 of them. They are the largest body of Sogdian writing on the road between Central Asia and India.[1] The inscriptions give almost nothing but names. One of the names they give most often is xwn, the Hun.[2]

Sites and corpus

The rocks came to light after the building of the Karakorum Highway between Pakistan and China. They lie at several desolate sites along the upper Indus, mainly downriver from Gilgit.[1] Some carry drawings of stupas or of ibex. Many carry graffiti in several scripts, among them the Indian Brahmi and Kharoshthi.[1] The Sogdian graffiti come first in number: about 550 at Shatial, 55 at Dadam Das, 26 at Oshibat, 19 at Thor, 8 at Thalpan, 6 at Hunza-Haldeikish and one each at Khanbari and at Campsite.[1] At Shatial the Sogdian graffiti outnumber the 410 Brahmi inscriptions, the 12 to 15 in Kharoshthi, the 9 in Bactrian and the two each in Parthian and in Middle Persian.[1]

Content

The inscriptions follow a fixed pattern: X son of Y, or X son of Y son of Z.[1] The longest of them is a prayer. “I, Nanai-vandak the son of Narisaf, have come here on the tenth day and asked a boon from the spirit of the sacred place K’rt that I may arrive at Tashkurgan more quickly and see my brother in good health with joy.”[2] The men who wrote the inscriptions were merchants. The inscriptions show a Sogdian presence on the road to India from the third century on.[3]

Date

By their script, some of the inscriptions are older than the Ancient Letters of about 313. Others belong to the fifth century at the earliest.[3] At least eight men at Shatial bear names formed on Maymurgh. The Wei Shu records this town of Sogdiana for the first time in the second third of the fifth century.[4] Twenty-four inscriptions can be set in the fifth century at the earliest, against four from the third or the fourth.[4] The script cannot be later than the beginning of the seventh century. No inscription bears a Göktürk name, and that excludes a later date as well.[4]

Some scholars go further. It sets the end of the Sogdian graffiti in the first half of the fifth century. Their argument rests on a weak sign, and they say so: among the sixteen inscriptions that name a xwn, none uses the name as a father’s name.[4] They explain the end by the expansion of the Hephthalites south of Sogdiana, over the roads that joined it to the upper Indus.[5]

The name xwn

After Nanai-vandak, the commonest name in the inscriptions is xwn, the Hun. Sixteen inscriptions carry it, most of them at Shatial. The others are at Oshibat and at Dadam Das.[2] The men called xwn have Sogdian fathers: xwn son of Varzakk, xwn son of Nanai-vandak.[2] A Sogdian father who names his son the Hun presupposes Huns in Sogdiana. The names may be the trace of a Hun conquest of Sogdiana. A period of calm followed, in which Sogdians and invaders mixed, not before the end of the fourth century and more probably in the fifth.[4] The Wei Shu has the Xiongnu take Sogdiana and a Xiongnu king rule at Samarkand in 457. These Xiongnu can only be the Kidarites, who reached Sogdiana after 440.[6]

Reliability

The inscriptions are the words of the travellers themselves, cut where they stopped. They are the only such words from this road. They contain no narrative and have no date. What they give is names. The names give two findings. Sogdian merchants went to India in numbers between the third and the fifth century. In the fifth century some Sogdians carried the name of the Huns.[3]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 79
  2. ^ a b c d Sogdian inscriptions of the upper Indus
  3. ^ a b c de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 81
  4. ^ a b c d e de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 82
  5. ^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 87
  6. ^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 108

Sources

Literature

  • Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)

Articles resting on this source 3

Huns · Sogdians · The Huns and the Xiongnu

Related

What links here2

Peoples
Sogdians
Sources
Sogdian inscriptions of the Talas valley

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Sogdian inscriptions of the upper Indus.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/upper-indus-sogdian-inscriptions/

Last revised: 8 November 2026