Letter 1: Nicholas Sims-Williams, “Towards a New Edition of the Sogdian Ancient Letters: Ancient Letter 1,” in Vaissière and Trombert, Les Sogdiens en Chine, 181–93. Letter 2: Nicholas Sims-Williams, “The Sogdian Ancient Letter II,” in Philologica et Linguistica: Historia, Pluralitas, Universitas; Festschrift für Helmut Humbach zum 80. Geburtstag am 4. Dezember 2001, ed. Maria Gabriela Schmidt and Walter Bisang (Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2001), 267–80; Nicholas Sims-Williams, “Sogdian Ancient Letter 2,” in Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China, ed. Annette L. Juliano and Judith A. Lerner (New York: Harry N. Abrams with the Asia Society, 2001), 47–49. A summary of letter 3 can be found in Nicholas Sims-Williams, “A Fourth-Century Abandoned Wife,” in Whitfield and Ursula Sims-Williams, Silk Road, 248–49. Letter 5: Frantz Grenet, Nicholas Sims-Williams, and Étienne de la Vaissière, “The Sogdian Ancient Letter V,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 12 (1998): 91–104.
16. Nicholas Sims-Williams, “Sogdian Ancient Letter II,” 261.
17. Either letters 3–5 were written between May 11, 313, and April 21, 314, or between June to December 313. Grenet et al., “Sogdian Ancient Letter V,” 102; see also Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, 45n5.
18. Etienne de la Vaissière, “Xiongnu,” in Encyclopædia Iranica Online Edition, November 15, 2006, available at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/xiongnu.
19. Pénélope Riboud, “Réflexions sur les pratiques religieuses designees sous le nom de xian,” in Vaissière and Trombert, Les Sogdiens en Chine, 73–91.
20. Nicholas Sims-Williams, “Fourth-Century Abandoned Wife,” 249.
21. This assumes that a vesicule has a value of 25 grams. Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, 53–55. For a general study of weights, see Boris I. Marshak and Valentina Raspopova, Sogdiiskie giri iz Pendzhikenta/Sogdian Weights from Panjikent (St. Petersburg: The Hermitage, 2005).
22. Nicholas Sims-Williams, “Ancient Letter 1,” 182.
23. Grenet et al., “Sogdian Ancient Letter V,” 100; Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, 53–54.
24. Grenet et al., “Sogdian Ancient Letter V,” 101.
25. Étienne de la Vaissière, “Is There a ‘Nationality’ of the Hephthalites?” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 17 (2007): 119–32.
26. Frantz Grenet, “Regional Interaction in Central Asia and Northwest India in the Kidarite and Hephthalite Periods,” in Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples: Proceedings of the British Academy, ed. Nicholas Sims-Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 220–21.
27. Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, 112–17.
28. For the most important publications about the site, see Boris I. Marshak and Valentina Raspopova, “Wall Paintings from a House with a Granary, Panjikent, 1st Quarter of the 8th Century A.D.,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 1 (1990): 123–76, especially 173n3. The current director of the excavations is Pavel Lur’e, head of the Oriental Department at the Hermitage Museum.
29. A. M. Belenitski and B. I. Marshak, “L’art de Piandjikent à la lumière des dernières fouilles (1958–1968),” Arts Asiatiques 23 (1971): 3–39.
30. Frantz Grenet and Étienne de la Vaissière, “The Last Days of Panjikent,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 8 (2002): 155–196, especially 176; Marshak and Raspopova, “Wall Paintings from a House with a Granary,” 125.
31. Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, 190–94.
32. Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, 191.
33. Valentina Raspopova, “Gold Coins and Bracteates from Pendjikent,” in Coins, Art and Chronology: Essays on the Pre-Islamic History of the Indo-Iranian Borderlands, ed. Michael Alram and Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999), 453–60.
34. Boris Marshak, personal communication, February 7, 2002.
35. Raspopova, “Gold Coins and Bracteates from Pendjikent,” 453–60.
36. G. A. Pugachenkova, “The Form and Style of Sogdian Ossuaries,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 8 (1994): 227–43; L. A. Pavchinskaia, “Sogdian Ossuaries,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 8 (1994): 209–25; Frantz Grenet, “L’art zoroastrien en Sogdiane: Études d’iconographie funéraire,” Mesopotamia 21 (1986): 97–131.
37. Boris I. Marshak, “On the Iconography of Ossuaries from Biya-Naiman,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 4 (1995–96): 299–321.
38. Raspopova, “Gold Coins and Bracteates,” 453–60.
39. Boris I. Marshak and Valentina Raspopova, “Cultes communautaires et cultes privés en Sogdiane,” in Bernard and Grenet, Histoire et cultes de l’Asie préislamique, 187–95, esp. 192.
40. Boris A. Litvinskij, La civilisation de l’Asie centrale antique, trans. Louis Vaysse (Rahden, Germany: Verlag Marie Leidorf, 1998), 182.
41. A. M. Belenitskii and B. I. Marshak, “The Paintings of Sogdiana,” in Sogdian Painting: The Pictorial Epic in Oriental Art, by Guitty Azarpay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 11–77, esp. 20–23.
42. Marshak and Raspopova, “Cultes communautaires et cultes privés,” 187–93.
43. Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, 163; Marshak and Raspopova, “Wall Paintings from a House with a Granary,” 140–42, identify the deity as the God of Victory, but Frantz Grenet sees Farn, the deity of fortune, instead. “Vaiśravaṇa in Sogdiana: About the Origins of Bishamon-Ten,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 4 (1995–96): 277–97, esp. 279.
44. Marshak and Raspopova, “Wall Paintings from a House with a Granary,” 150–53, figure 24 on 151.
45. Boris Marshak, Legends, Tales, and Fables in the Art of Sogdiana (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 2002).
46. Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, 162, plate 5, illustration 1.
47. Varkhuman’s name was transcribed in Chinese as Fuhuman. Liu, Jiu Tang shu, 221b:6244; Chavannes, Documents sur les Tou-Kiue, 135.
48. For a general introduction to the paintings, see Matteo Compareti and Étienne de la Vaissière, eds., Royal Naurūz in Samarkand: Proceedings of the Conference Held in Venice on the Pre-Islamic Painting at Afrasiab (Rome: Instituto Editoriali e Poligrafici Inter-nazionali, 2006), 59–74. The essays in this volume present the most up-to-date analysis of the Afrasiab paintings. See also L. I. Al’baum, Zhivopis’ Afrasiaba [Paintings from Afrosiab] (Tashkent, USSR: FAN, 1975); Boris I. Marshak, “Le programme iconographique des peintures de la ‘Salle des ambassadeurs’ à Afrasiab (Samarkand),” Arts Asiatiques 49 (1994): 5–20; “The Self-Image of the Sogdians,” in Vaissière and Trombert, Les Sogdiens en Chine, 123–40; Matteo Compareti, “Afrāsiāb ii. Wall Paintings,” in Encyclopædia Iranica Online Edition, April 14, 2009, available at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/afrasiab-ii-wall-paintings-2.
49. Grenet, “Self-Image of the Sogdians.”
50. Frantz Grenet, “What was the Afrasiab Painting About,” in Compareti and Vaissière, Royal Naurūz in Samarkand, 43–58, esp. 44–47 about the eastern wall.
51. Frantz Grenet, “The 7th-Century AD ‘Ambassadors’ Painting’ at Samarkand,” in Mural Paintings of the Silk Road: Cultural Exchanges between East and West, ed. Kuzuya Yamauchi (Tokyo: Archetype, 2007), 16; Vladimir Livšic, “The Sogdian Wall Inscriptions on the Site of Afrasiab,” in Compareti and Vaissière, Royal Naurūz in Samarkand, 59–74.
52. Anazawa Wakō and Manome Junichi, “Afurashiyabu tojōshi shutsudo no hekiga ni mirareru Chōsen jin shisetsu ni tsuite” [Korean envoys on the mural painting from ancient Samarkand], Chōsen Gakuhō 80 (1976): 1–36.
53. Etsuko Kageyama, “A Chinese Way of Depicting Foreign Delegates Discerned in the Paintings of Afrasiab,” Cahiers de Studia Iranica 25 (2002): 313–27.
54. One reconstruction of the missing top section of the wall, by the head of the Oriental Department of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Boris Marshak, places the deity Nana, the supreme goddess of the Sogdians, in the throne above all the emissaries. See his “Sogudo no bijutsu” [Sogdian Art], in Sekai bijutsu daizenshū: Chūō Ajia [New history of world art: Central Asia], ed. Tanabe Katsumi and Maeda Kōsaku (Tokyo: Shūgakkan, 1999)
, 156–79. In contrast, Grenet, “Self-Image of the Sogdians,” suggests that the throned Varkhuman occupied the same position, while Étienne de la Vaissière, “Les Turcs, rois du monde à Samarcande,” 147–62, in Compareti and Vaissière, Royal Naurūz in Samarkand, proposes that the kaghan of the Western Turks was there.
55. The northern wall is illustrated in Compareti and Vaissière, Royal Naurūz in Samarkand, Plate 5, 27.
56. Marshak, “Le programme iconographique des peintures;” Grenet, “Self-Image of the Sogdians.”
57. al-Bīrūnī, The Chronology of Ancient Nations, trans. C. Edward Sachau (Frankfurt: Institute for the History of Arabic Islamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, 1998; reprint of 1879 original), 201–4, 222.
58. Grenet, “Self-Image of the Sogdians,” 132.
59. Grenet and Vaissière, “Last Days of Panjikent,” 155.
60. The Mount Mugh documents have been published in three volumes: A. A. Freiman, Opisanie, publikatsii, i issledovanie dokumentov s gory Mug: Sogdiiskie dokumenty s gory Mug 1 [Description, publications, and studies of the documents from Mount Mugh: Sogdian Documents from Mount Mugh 1] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vostochnoi Literatury, 1962); Vladimir A. Livshits, Iuridicheskie dokumenty i pis’ma: Sogdiiskie dokumenty s gory Mug 2 [Legal documents and letters: Sogdian documents from Mount Mugh 2] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vostochnoi Literatury, 1962); M. N. Bogoliubov and O. I. Smirnova, Khoziaistvennye dokumenty: Dokumenty s gory Mug 3 [Economic documents from Mount Mugh 3] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vostochnoi Literatury, 1963). Recently, V. A. Livshits published a new edition of these documents: Sogdiiskaia epigrafika Srednei Azii i Semirech’ia (St. Petersburg: Filologicheskii Fakul’tet Sankt-Peterburgskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 2008).
61. Ilya Yakubovich reports that the villagers mistook the Sogdian script for Arabic and believed that the document gave instructions for finding an ancient treasure. See his “Mugh 1.I Revisited,” Studia Iranica 31, no. 2 (2002): 231–52.
62. This account is based on a conversation I had with Boris Marshak on March 25, 2000, at the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Marshak knew Puloti personally, and Puloti told him this story. Livshits, Sogdiiskie dokumenty s gory Mug 2, gives a shorter version on 108–9 and reproduces a photograph of document 1.I facing 112.
63. Yakubovich, “Mugh 1.I Revisited.”
64. This is the total number of documents as given in O. I. Smirnova, Ocherki iz istorii Sogda [Essays on the history of Sogdiana] (Moscow: Nauk, 1970), 14. The Mount Mugh documents are numbered according to the time at which they were found: document 1.1 was found in the spring of 1932; those documents with the Cyrillic letter B (= the English letter V) were excavated by Puloti in May 1933; A documents were excavated by A. Vasil’ev in the summer of 1933; those with the letter Б (= English letter B) were found in November 1933 by the Freiman expedition; and the Nov. (“New”) documents were given by Puloti in 1934. After the excavation had ended and the Freiman team returned to Leningrad, Puloti was pressured into handing over a group of documents that he had been given before Freiman’s arrival: an upside-down basket that held six leather documents, including the longest documents found at Mount Mugh, a marriage contract, and the accompanying “bride’s script.”
65. A. S. Polyakov, “Kitaiskie rukopisi, naidennye v 1933 g. b Tadzhikistane,” in Sogdiiskii sbornik [Sogdian miscellany], ed. N. I. Krachkovskii and A. A. Freiman (Leningrad: Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1934), 91–117, esp. 103, photograph on 99.
66. I. Y. Kratchkovsky, “A Letter from Sogdiana (1934),” in Among Arabic Manuscripts: Memories of Libraries and Men, trans. Tatiana Minorsky (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1953), 142–50.
67. For a translation of the letter, see Richard N. Frye, “Tarxūn-Türxṻn and Central Asian History,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 14 (1951): 105–29, translation on 108–9.
68. David Stephan Powers, trans., The History of al-Ṭabari (Ta’rĪkh al-rusul wa’l mulūk), vol. 24, The Empire in Transition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 171, 177–78, 183.
69. Freiman, Sogdiiskie dokumenty s gory Mug 1, 7.
70. Krachkovskii and Freiman, Sogdiiskii sbornik, 29.
71. Bogoliubov and Smirnova, Khoziaistvennye dokumenty.
72. Krachkovskii and Freiman, Sogdiiskii sbornik, 29.
73. Documents Nov. 3 (the contract) and Nov. 4 (the groom’s obligations) were originally transcribed and translated in Livshits, Dokumenty s gory Mug 2, 21–26. The most up-to-date translation is by Ilya Yakubovich, “Marriage Sogdian Style,” in Iranistik in Europa—Gestern, Heute, Morgen, ed. H. Eichner, Bert G. Fragner, Velizar Sadovski, and Rüdiger Schmitt (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006), 307–44. See also the brief discussion in Ilya Gershevitch, “The Sogdian Word for ‘Advice,’ and Some Mugh Documents,” Central Asiatic Journal 7 (1962): 90–94; W. B. Henning, “A Sogdian God,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 28 (1965): 242–54.
74. Maria Macuch, Das sasanidische Rechtsbuch “Mātakdān i hazār dātistān” (Teil 2) (Wiesbaden, Germany: Kommissionsverlag F. Steiner, 1981).
75. Yakubovich, “Marriage Sogdian Style,” surveys a wide range of marriage documents but finds only one other group of contracts—fifth-century BCE Aramaic agreements from the Jewish settlement in Elephantine, Egypt—that allow the wife to initiate divorce. He suggests two possibilities: perhaps Sogdian society afforded women more rights than many neighboring societies, or perhaps Cher was able to obtain unusually favorable conditions for his ward.
76. Scholars of Sogdian debate the meaning of this passage, with some contending that the phrase “by god Mithra” should be translated as “by God [that is, Ahura Mazda] and Mithra.” Henning, “A Sogdian God,” 248; Yakubovich, “Marriage Sogdian Style.”
77. Document B-4 is transcribed and translated into Russian in Livshits, Sogdiiskie dokumenty s gory Mug 2, 56–58; see also the brief discussion in Gershevitch, “Sogdian Word for ‘Advice,’” 84.
78. Document B-8 is transcribed and translated into Russian in Livshits, Sogdiiskie dokumenty s gory Mug 2, 47–48. Ilya Gershevitch revises the translation in his “Sogdians on a Frogplain,” in Mélanges linguistiques offerts à Emile Benveniste (Paris: Société de Linguistique de Paris, 1975), 195–211.
79. Gershevitch, “Sogdians on a Frogplain,” 205–6, with Gershevitch’s brackets removed to make the translation more readable. See also Frantz Grenet, “Annexe: Le contrat funéraire sogdien du Mont Mugh,” in Les pratiques funéraires dans l’Asie centrale sédentaire de la conquête Grecque à l’Islamisation (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1984), 313–22.
80. See, for example, Paul Bernard’s response in Grenet, “Annexe,” 321–22.
81. Grenet and Vaissière, “Last Days of Panjikent,” marks a genuine breakthrough in the clarification of these confusing events.
82. Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, 199–200.
83. Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, 161–62.
84. Yakubovich, “Mugh 1.I Revisited.”
85. Frantz Grenet, “Les ‘Huns’ dans les documents sogdiens du mont Mugh (avec an appendix par N. Sims-Williams),” in Études irano-aryennes offertes à Gilbert Lazard, ed. C.-H. de Fouchécour and Ph. Gignoux, Cahiers de Studia Iranica 7 (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Irannienes, 1989), 17.
86. A-14, A-9, Grenet and Vaissière, “Last Days of Panjikent,” 168–69, 172.
87. Powers, Empire in Transition, 172–74; Grenet and Vaissière, “Last Days of Panjikent,” 156.
88. E. V. Zeimal, “The Political History of Transoxiana,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, volume 3, The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, part 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 259–60.
89. Richard Frye, “Tarxūn-Türxṻn and Central Asian History,” 112–13; E. V. Zeimal, “Political History of Transoxiana,” 259–60; Powers, Empire in Transition, 171, 177–78, 183.
90. Powers, Empire in Transition, 178. Powers renders Dēwāšt
īč’s name in Arabic as al-Diwashini, the same name that Kratchkovsky read as Divashni. Powers inserts the word “Christian” in brackets before “burial place,” but the Arabic original says nāwūs (Yakubovich, “Mugh 1.I Revisited,” 249n31), so I have dropped the word here.
91. Yakubovich, “Mugh 1.I Revisited.”
92. Document A-21, discussed in Polyakov, “Kitaiskie rukopisi.”
93. Anna A. Ierusalimskaja and Birgitt Borkopp, Von China nach Byzanz (Munich: Bayerischen Nationalmuseum, 1996), item no. 120.
94. Elfriede R. Knauer, “A Man’s Caftan and Leggings from the North Caucasus of the Eighth to Tenth Century: A Genealogical Study,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 36 (2001): 125–54.
95. Hyunhee Park, “The Delineation of a Coastline: The Growth of Mutual Geographic Knowledge in China and the Islamic World from 750–1500” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2008), 45.
96. Bloom, Paper before Print.
97. Grenet, “Self-Image of the Sogdians,” 134.
CHAPTER 5
1. George F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times, ed. John Carswell, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 61.
2. Sun Fuxi, director, Institute of Preservation and Archeology, Xi’an City, personal communication, April 30, 2004.
3. Cheng Linquan, Zhang Xianyu, and Zhang Xiaoli, “Xi’an Bei Zhou Li Dan mu chutan” [A preliminary exploration on the Northern Zhou tomb of Li Dan in Xi’an], Yishushi Yanjiu 7 (2005): 299–308.
4. For an up-to-date survey of the most important finds and the extensive literature about them, see Judith Lerner, “Aspects of Assimilation: The Funerary Practices and Furnishings of Central Asians in China,” Sino-Platonic Papers 168 (2005): 1–51.
5. Structures of this type are usually called “house-shaped sarcophagi” in the scholarly literature. Wu Hung suggests several possible precedents for these funerary structures, which were in use in earlier centuries and in regions some distance from Xi’an and the other cities with Sogdian graves, in his “A Case of Cultural Interaction: House-Shaped Sarcophagi of the Northern Dynasties,” Orientations 34, no. 5 (2002): 34–41.
The Silk Road: A New History Page 35