Motifs on some of the ossuaries document the belief that Ahura Mazda would use the bones of the deceased to reconstitute them on the Judgment Day.37 The burial of coins with the dead shows that the living thought they would benefit from having a gold coin, or an imitation gold coin, near them. The practice does not seem to have been limited to the wealthy; one of the deceased buried with such coin was a potter.38
Not all the dead were buried in Zoroastrian ossuaries; one graveyard in Panjikent included tombs with fully extended bodies, apparently Christian-style burials. One corpse wore a cross made from bronze.39 A writing exercise in Syriac has been found, most likely copied by a Sogdian student studying the liturgical language of the Church of the East.40
ZOROASTRIAN BURIAL IN SAMARKAND
This clay ossuary, found in the village of Molla-Kurgan outside Samarkand, held the bones of the deceased after they had been cleaned. The lid of the box shows two woman dancers wearing transparent robes. Since there is no evidence of priestesses in the Samarkand region, they may be mourners at a funeral, or perhaps beautiful young women coming to greet the newly dead in the afterlife. The base shows a fire altar flanked by two Zoroastrian priests, who wear padam face masks and head coverings to keep any bodily substance or hair from polluting the fire. Courtesy of Frantz Grenet.
The houses excavated so far, numbering over 130, include the dwellings of ordinary people as well as the very rich.41 The large houses all have a fire altar in one room, the room for family prayers. Smaller, portable fire altars were kept in reception halls; these held religious images as well as pictures of worshippers, themselves often family members. The widespread presence of fire altars throughout the city indicates that most of the town’s residents were Zoroastrians, but the Sogdians were open to other religious beliefs as well.
Different Sogdian households chose a deity that they worshipped in their own houses and whose pictures they placed on the walls of their reception rooms. These deities, with varying iconographical attributes, have not all been identified. Clearly Nana, an originally Mesopotamian goddess, had many devotees.42 A deity shown sitting on a camel or holding a small camel figurine was also venerated by travelers.43 One house owner placed a small image of the Buddha in a separate room in his house; although not as big as the paintings of the God of Victory and Nana in his house, the image demonstrates his willingness to accept a non-Sogdian deity.44
PANJIKENT STREET SCENE
The wealthiest urban residents lived in multistoried dwellings with large halls, which could seat a hundred, complete with elaborate wall paintings and lavish carvings (4). Their homes were located close to shops and craftspeople’s workshops (7) and a forge (8). Their poorer neighbors lived in smaller houses, often of two stories and sometimes with several rooms decorated with small paintings (9). Their occupants produced the crafts and staffed the shops where the rich purchased these items. From Guitty Azarpay, Sogdian Painting: The Pictorial Epic in Oriental Art, University of California Press, 1981 © The Regents of the University of California.
The houses of the wealthiest have wall paintings extending from the ceiling to the floor divided into different levels. On the highest part of the wall, facing doorways, are large portraits of deities, with donors—the householders themselves—below. The middle section paintings, roughly one yard (1 m) high, portray well-known folk tales from other countries: the Iranian epic Rustam, Aesop’s fables, and Indian tales from the Panchatantra. In the bottom frame, usually about 20 inches (.5 m) high, are scrolls showing scenes in sequence that would have been narrated by a storyteller. As the page-sized format makes clear, these were copied from book illustrations.45
Although the residents of Panjikent commissioned paintings with many different types of subject matter, almost no paintings show commercial activity. Archeologists have identified one house with a painting of a lavish banquet as the house of a merchant who lived immediately next to one of the bazaars. The sole indication that the guests are merchants—and not nobles—is that, instead of the usual sword, one guest wears a black bag attached to his belt.46
Merchants are also absent from the large and beautiful set of murals from the Afrasiab site in Samarkand, which provide a visual introduction to the political situation of Samarkand. The realistic subject matter of the Afrasiab paintings distinguishes them from other Sogdian wall paintings depicting legends and deities found at Panjikent and the Varakhsha fortress outside Bukhara. They were painted between 660 and 661 during the reign of the Sogdian king Varkhuman, a name that appears in the official Chinese histories, because the Chinese emperor Gaozong (reigned 649–83) awarded him the title of governor of Sogdiana. In 631, an earlier Sogdian king made a similar request for an alliance with the Chinese, but the emperor Taizong turned him down on the grounds that Samarkand was too distant and that the Chinese would be unable to send troops if they were needed.47
Now located in the Afrasiab History Museum, these paintings were salvaged in 1965 after a bulldozer digging a new road removed the room’s ceiling. The Afrasiab wall paintings stand over 6.5 feet (2 meters) tall and 35 feet (10.7 m) long and fill the four walls of an imposing square room in the house of a wealthy, aristocratic family. As the top section of the paintings on three of the four walls was bulldozed away, archeologists are uncertain of the paintings’ original height.48
The Afrasiab paintings deserve careful study because they illuminate how the Sogdians viewed the larger world.49 A few different figures, including a goose and a woman, bear labels written in small black Sogdian script that identify their owner as Varkhuman, who was probably acquainted with the owners of the house. One enters the room with the paintings through the heavily damaged eastern wall, which shows scenes from India, but it is difficult to make much out.50
PANJIKENT HOUSE
Many of the houses of the wealthy in Panjikent had a large reception room like this with high columns that displayed a painting of a deity. This family worshipped the originally Mesopotamian deity Nana, but other Panjikent houses had paintings of other deities as well. Note the multiple tiers of painting on the wall behind the goddess; Panjikent artists typically divided wall paintings into horizontal sections like this. From Guitty Azarpay, Sogdian Painting: The Pictorial Epic in Oriental Art, University of California Press, 1981 © The Regents of the University of California.
The western wall facing the viewer portrays ambassadors and emissaries from different countries, who march in an impressive procession. Bulldozed away, the top figure presiding over the scene is missing. On the left-hand side of the western wall, a headless figure, the second from the left, is wearing a white robe with a long inscription in Sogdian on it. This inscription, the only long text on the painting, records the speech of an envoy from Chaghanian, a small kingdom just south of Samarkand near the modern city of Denau, Uzbekistan, as he presents his credentials to Varkhuman:
When King Varkhuman Unash came to him [the ambassador] opened his mouth [and said thus]:
“I am Pukarzate, the chancellor of Chaganian. I arrived here from Turantash, the lord of Chaganian, to Samarkand, to the king, and with respect [to] the king [now] I am [here]. And with regard to me do not have any misgivings: about the gods of Samarkand, as well as about the writing of Samarkand I am keenly aware, and I also have not done any harm to the king. Let you be quite fortunate!”
And King Varkhuman Unash took leave [of him].
And [then] the chancellor of Chach opened his mouth.51
This inscription presents one part of a protocol, and it probably continued with the speech of the envoy from Chach (modern Tashkent). The Chaghanian emissary claims knowledge of both the language and the gods of Samarkand. Although only the Chaghanian’s speech is visible now, it is likely that the speeches of all the envoys were originally written in different places on the wall painting.
Here the artist’s desire to depict a world order with Samarkand at its center is at its most obvious. Five Chinese, wearing typical Chinese black caps and robes, stand in the
center and carry rolls of silk, skeins of silk thread, and silk in cocoons. Shown in a stance of deference, the Chinese come bearing gifts like other emissaries, although in actuality the ruler of Samarkand depended on them for military support. The Chinese are more significant than the other emissaries, and so they are placed in the focal point of the composition. On the upper left are four seated men whose long braids and swords mark them as Turks, probably mercenaries.
On the right-hand edge of the picture stands a wooden frame on which two flags hang down diagonally; drums with vivid monster faces are propped up in front. Two men wearing feathered headdresses stand with their hands in their sleeves; they are Korean, quite possibly from the state of Koguryo, which ceased to exist in 669.52 These figures so closely resemble contemporary Chinese paintings that they may, in fact, be based on Chinese models, and not portraits from life.53 They stand observing the figures to the left, whose simple clothing and headdresses contrast with the others’ robes. One has an animal skin over his arm. These mountain people listen to an interpreter whose finger is pointed up in the air.54
THE WORLD OF THE SOGDIANS
Forty-two figures, all representatives of the major powers, appear in the original wall painting of the ambassadors from Afrasiab, Samarkand. This reconstruction shows the surviving parts on a white background and the artist’s reconstruction on gray. The western wall illustrates the genuinely cosmopolitan world in which the Sogdians lived. Their immediate neighbors from what is now southern Uzbekistan and Tashkent appear, as do those from much more distant places like China and Korea. © 2010 F. Ory-UMR 8546-CNRS.
The importance of the Chinese is also clear from the northern wall, which shows Chinese women on a boat and a hunting scene.55 To the right of the empress’s boat is a vigorous hunting scene in which Chinese huntsmen spear leopards. The oversized figure on the right has to be the Chinese emperor, for Sogdian artistic convention portrayed only deities and monarchs as larger than life-size.56
The southern wall depicts a Zoroastrian ceremony complete with sacrificial victims (the four geese), two Zoroastrian dignitaries carrying clubs on camel-back, and a horse led by a Zoroastrian priest wearing a face-mask. This face mask, called a padam in Pahlavi, was a veil covering the nose and mouth to protect the fire altar from contact with body fluids. The ceremony could well be the Nauruz festival described by the calendrical expert al-Biruni, himself a native of Khorezm, the region northwest of Samarkand.57 (Even though it is non-Islamic, Nauruz is still today a major holiday across Central Asia and the Caucasus, and even in Iran.) Writing in the year 1000, several centuries after the Islamic conquest of the city, he recounts that the Persian king led his people in a six-day ceremony to celebrate the coming of spring and that the Sogdians celebrated the same festival in the summer. The southern wall offers a parallel composition to the northern, but some of the figures in the procession have been effaced. Opposite the Chinese emperor is a white elephant, which probably carried the no-longer-visible Samarkand queen, while the figure on horseback at the end of the procession is the ruler of Samarkand, Varkhuman himself.
The Afrasiab paintings give paramount importance to interactions with the outside world, especially envoys. These diplomats are shown engaging in tradelike activities, but they are actually presenting real-life commodities such as silk cloth and silk thread. In the middle of the seventh century Varkhuman portrayed the peoples belonging to the Sino-Turkish alliance.58 His painters gave the Chinese pride of place, as befitted their role as the most important ally of the Sogdians.
But the political orientation of Samarkand—and all of Central Asia—was about to undergo a seismic shift. Following the death of Muhammad in 632, the Arabs under the leadership of the Rightly Guided Caliphs and then the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750) conquered north Africa, southern Spain, and Iran. After defeating the Sasanians in 651, they continued to move east through Central Asia, and targeted Samarkand. They took the city for the first time in 671, and in 681 an Arab governor was able to spend his first winter in the region.59 Between 705 and 715, the Arab general Qutayba ibn Muslim campaigned in Sogdiana and in 712 conquered Samarkand.
The largest group of Sogdian-language documents found in Sogdiana—and not in western China—date to this period. In 1933 Soviet archeologists uncovered an extraordinary cache of nearly one hundred documents at Mount Mugh, 75 miles (120 km) east of Samarkand in Tajikistan.60 These documents offer a unique account of the Islamic conquest from the vantage point of the conquered—and not the conquering—peoples. In capturing one ruler’s desperate negotiations with Turks, Chinese, and other local rulers in his last-ditch efforts to keep the Islamic armies at bay, they remind us that the Islamic conquest of Central Asia was slow and uncertain, and the Chinese of the Tang dynasty played a difficult-to-discern role in the region’s politics in the early eighth century.
The documents at Mount Mugh were found by local people, not by a foreign expedition. In czarist times, the residents of the village of Kum, some 4 miles (6 km) away, knew that the hilltop held some kind of treasure. In the spring of 1932 a few local shepherd boys visited the site. They dug around in a pit, unearthed several documents on leather, put the others back, and brought the most complete piece back to their village.61 The local Communist Party secretary, Abdulhamid Puloti, who had studied history in Tashkent, got wind of the find and promised a villager a job as a policeman in return for help in finding the documents. When Puloti was finally taken to a villager’s house, the host reached into a hollow section between the wall and a door post and pulled out a document. Puloti alerted his superiors, who in turn informed the cultural authorities, and the document, later numbered 1.I, was transferred to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.62 The document was confiscated by the first secretary of the Communist Party in Tajikistan, D. Husejnov, and disappeared after 1933 when he was purged.63
Like many Asian peoples, the Sogdians dated documents by the reign year of a given ruler; many of the Mugh documents were dated between the first and fourteenth years of the ruler Devashtich (a more technical romanization is Dēwāštīč). But because the years of Devashtich’s reign were unknown, scholars could not assign a precise date. Of the ninety-seven documents found at Mount Mugh, ninety-two are written in Sogdian, three in Chinese, one in Arabic, and one in Runic script in a language not yet identified.64 One of the Chinese documents was dated 706, suggesting that the documents probably dated to the early years of the eighth century.65
The sole Arabic document proved to be the key to dating the documents, as the great Soviet Arabist I. Y. Kratchkovsky (1883–1951) explains in his memoirs.66 In the letter, Devashtich writes to the Arab governor of Khurasan, al-Jarrah in perfect Arabic, which suggests that he hired a scribe. Identifying himself as a mawla, or client, of the governor, he offers to send the two sons of Tarxun, the previous ruler of Samarkand, to the governor for safekeeping.67 When he read the letter, Kratchkovsky remembered that the great historian al-Tabari had written about a landed noble (diqhan) from Samarkand named Divashni, who had resisted the Islamic conquest between 721 to 722.68 Divashni, Kratchkovsky realized, was a scribal error for Divashti, one of several Arabic renderings of the name Devashtich. That crucial identification made it possible to date the Mount Mugh documents to 709–22.
In response to the news of the discovery, the Academy of Social Sciences in Leningrad sent an expedition to Tajikistan headed by A. A. Freiman (1879–1968), the leading Soviet scholar of Sogdian. For two weeks in November 1933, Freiman led a team from the Academy of Sciences who excavated the site.69 It was the ideal location for a fortress: the Kum and Zerafshan rivers surrounded it on three sides, and the residents had constructed inner and outer walls for further protection.
The fortress held only a few large clay pots to store water, a clear indication that its residents depended on the people of the nearby village to carry water a quarter of a mile (0.5 km) from the nearest creek. Too small to house an army unit, the citadel was designed to be the home of the ruler who live
d inside with a few family members and servants, but, when necessary, its large rooms and courtyard could temporarily house one hundred families.
THE SITE OF THE MOUNT MUGH FORTRESS
Mount Mugh is a small, remote peak that stands 5,000 feet (1,500 m) above sea level in Tajikistan just across from the border with Uzbekistan. Surrounded by water on three sides, it made the perfect refuge for about a hundred families fleeing the invading Muslim armies in the early 700s. Courtesy of Frantz Grenet.
After examining the artifacts found at the site, archeologists were able to determine the use of the different rooms within the small five-room fortress. The four rectangular rooms measured 57 feet (17.3 m) long and between 6 and 7.2 feet (1.8–2.2 m) wide, with a ceiling only 5.5 feet (1.7 m) above the ground. The building was not luxurious. The rooms received light only from the south, where a wall, no longer preserved, had originally contained windows.
To the surprise of the excavators, almost nothing of value was left at the site. The terrace was a garbage pit covered by a 20-inch- (.5 m) thick layer of little pieces of bone, clay, and fabric. Room 1 had a 39-inch- (1 m) thick deposit consisting of nine distinct layers of animal manure separated by clay-heavy loess soil, suggesting the citadel had been occupied for nine to ten years. Because it also contained wood scraps, the excavators concluded room 1 had been a wood workshop that had doubled as a barn during the winters. Room 2, the kitchen, held the bulk of household utensils: clay pots, fragments of dishes, reed baskets, small clay cups, beans, and barley seeds, along with traces of fire. Since room 3 was almost entirely empty except for some small glass bottles and a hair comb, the archeologists concluded that it served as a granary. Room 4 had the most artifacts, including three clay jars, many household utensils, three coins (one of silver), metal arrowheads, pieces of clothing, and a belt buckle. All these artifacts were from the upper floor, which had collapsed on top of the lower level.70
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