Sogdia

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Between two rivers the land is green. The Zarafshan — the gold-strewer — falls out of the high Pamir and runs west across a country that the desert otherwise owns, watering a string of oases before it dies in the sands short of the Oxus. Along that thread sit the cities: Samarkand on its great mounded acropolis, Bukhara to the southwest, Panjikent upstream toward the mountains, smaller walled towns between. This is Sogdia, the land the Greeks called Sogdiana and the Sogdians themselves Suγδ — a country with no empire of its own to speak of, ringed by powers that conquered it in turn, and yet for some six centuries the most consequential commercial and cultural nervous system in inner Asia. The Sogdians did not rule the Silk Road. They were the Silk Road’s connective tissue, and through their hands moved not only silk and silver but the gods of four religions.

A valley of city-states

The Sogdian homeland was never a single kingdom. It was a federation of oasis principalities, each centered on a walled city and its irrigated hinterland, each with its own ruler — Samarkand the senior among them, Bukhara, Panjikent, Kesh, Nasaf — bound by a shared Eastern Iranian language, a shared script, a shared calendar, and a shared mercantile vocation rather than by a central throne. The country had been a satrapy of the first Persian empire: the Achaemenid Empire counted Sogdiana among its eastern provinces, and the rebel Spitamenes made it the hardest ground Alexander of Macedon had to fight for, between 329 and 327 BCE. Greek garrisons, Kushan overlords, Hephthalite and then Western Türk suzerains followed across the centuries, but the cities endured beneath each, paying tribute and keeping their own affairs.

What the cities left behind is extraordinarily vivid. At Panjikent — abandoned in the eighth century and never rebuilt, so that archaeologists call it a Central Asian Pompeii — the reception halls of merchant houses were painted floor to ceiling. The murals, made between the fifth century and roughly 722 CE, show feasting nobles and mounted heroes, the epic cycle of Rustam, fables that traveled from Aesop, and above all the gods: deities several meters high, rendered in a bright, crowded, narrative style that owes something to India, something to Iran, something to the Hellenistic world the Sogdians had absorbed. The acropolis of old Samarkand, the mound called Afrasiab, yielded in 1965 the so-called Paintings of the Ambassadors — a mid-seventh-century cycle in which embassies from China, the steppe, and the Iranian world converge on the Sogdian king Varkhuman, a single room recording the whole reach of Sogdian diplomacy. These are not the remains of a marginal people. They are the self-image of a confident urban civilization that had made the brokering of the continent its business.

The merchant diaspora

The Sogdians’ genius was movement. From the Zarafshan they spread eastward along the trade roads in a chain of resident colonies that reached, by the early centuries CE, deep into China — merchant communities at the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin, at Dunhuang on the Chinese frontier, at the Gansu corridor’s waystations, and eventually in the Tang capitals of Chang’an and Luoyang, where Sogdians served as caravan leaders, interpreters, moneylenders, jewelers, and officials. Their commercial dominance ran from roughly the fourth to the ninth century, and at its height the Sogdian network was the principal channel by which the products of China, India, Iran, and Byzantium changed hands.

The single most eloquent witness to this world is a packet of paper that never arrived. In 1907, in the ruins of a watchtower on the old Han frontier wall west of Dunhuang, Aurel Stein recovered five Sogdian letters — the documents now known as the Ancient Letters, the oldest substantial texts in the Sogdian language. The most famous of them, dated to June or July of 313 CE, was written by a merchant named Nanai-vandak, stationed in the Gansu corridor, to his business partners in Samarkand two thousand miles to the west. He reports calamity: famine in the interior of China, the burning of Luoyang, the flight of the emperor before the steppe armies — the catastrophe of the Western Jin, seen through the eyes of a foreign trader watching his markets collapse. He gives orders about consignments and debts; another letter in the cache, from a woman named Miwnay, is a bitter complaint to an absent husband who has stranded her. None of the letters reached Samarkand. Intercepted somewhere in the postal relay, wrapped in silk and coarse cloth and addressed in a careful hand, they lay in the desert for sixteen centuries — a postal accident that preserved, intact, the texture of a diaspora that otherwise survives mostly as a name in other people’s records.

The diaspora carried more than goods, and this is the heart of the matter. A trading network that ran unbroken from the Iranian plateau to the Chinese coast, staffed by multilingual agents who lived for generations in foreign cities, was the ideal conductor for ideas. The same caravans that moved silver and silk moved scriptures, missionaries, liturgies, and gods. The Sogdian language itself became the lingua franca of the eastern Silk Road — the common tongue of trade and, increasingly, of religion, up to the time of the Arab conquests. Sogdian scribes, fluent in several languages, became the translators of the road: it was largely through Sogdian that the sacred texts of Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Christianity were carried into the further languages of inner Asia. To follow the Sogdians eastward is to follow four religions across a continent.

The home religion

The faith the Sogdians took with them began as their own. The religion of the Zarafshan was a regional Mazdaism — a Zoroastrianism that shared the dualist architecture and the reverence for fire and the dead taught in the Avesta and ascribed to Zoroaster, but that grew its own crowded pantheon by absorbing deities from Mesopotamia, India, and the Greek world. The Panjikent painters did not depict the austere fire-altar theology of the Sasanian priesthood to the southwest. They depicted gods. Foremost among them was Nana — Nanai — a goddess whose lineage reaches back to third-millennium Mesopotamia and who had been carried east through the Kushan realm before she became the great civic deity of Samarkand, painted four-armed and enthroned, sometimes seated on a lion. Beside her stood Weshparkar, a wind-god whose three-faced, trident-bearing iconography was borrowed from the image of Shiva, his name and form drawn from the Indian Vāyu. Funerary practice followed the Iranian pattern of excarnation and the preservation of cleaned bones in ossuaries, the body kept from defiling fire, earth, and water — a recognizably Mazdean concern worked out in a local idiom.

This was not the temple religion of Persia transplanted; it was a Sogdian synthesis, and its very openness — its habit of taking in a foreign god and giving it a Sogdian name and a place on the wall — is the same disposition that made the Sogdians such effective carriers of other faiths. A civilization at ease with the goddess of Babylon wearing the arms of an Indian deity was a civilization prepared to move Mani’s church and the Buddha’s law and the cross of the East Syrians along the same roads it moved its bales of silk. The Sogdian relationship to the Sasanian-Iranian wisdom tradition to the southwest was thus oblique: kin in cosmology, independent in cult, and — crucially — outside the reach of the Sasanian state church that elsewhere policed orthodoxy and persecuted Mani’s followers.

The corridor of four faiths

Buddhism

The eastward passage begins with Buddhism. Long before the Sogdians were Muslim, many of them were Buddhist, and Sogdian translators were among the agents who carried the dharma along the Tarim and into China. The earliest named translator of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese whose origin can be located in this world bore the surname that Chinese convention assigned to men of Samarkand — Kang, marking a man of Kangju, the Sogdian country — and Sogdian-language Buddhist texts among the Central Asian finds preserve sutras and commentaries rendered from Indic and Chinese originals. The Sogdians were not the inventors of any Buddhist doctrine; they were its freight-handlers, the merchant-translators who moved a missionary religion down a missionary road.

Manichaeism

The faith most bound up with the Sogdian network, however, was the one Mani designed for exactly such roads. Manichaeism — the dualist religion of Light and Darkness founded by Mani in third-century Sasanian Mesopotamia — was missionary by intention, written down by its founder in a closed canon explicitly so that it could be translated faithfully into any tongue. When the Sasanian state turned on it after Mani’s death in prison, the religion’s center of gravity shifted eastward, and it traveled the Silk Road through Sogdian and Bactrian merchant hands. By the seventh and eighth centuries Manichaean monasteries flourished in the Turfan oasis, and the Sogdian communities of the eastern routes were among the religion’s principal congregations and patrons.

The documentary trace of this is one of the great manuscript recoveries of modern scholarship. Four German expeditions to the Turfan region between 1902 and 1914 brought back to Berlin some forty thousand fragments, of which roughly twelve thousand are Manichaean — written in Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Old Uyghur, Bactrian, Tocharian, Chinese, and Syriac, in the Manichaean script and several others. The Sogdian component is large and central: hymns, sermons, confession-texts, and shreds of Mani’s own canon survive in Sogdian alongside the other tongues. Among them are fragments of the Book of Giants — Mani’s recension of an ancient Jewish story of the fallen angels and their monstrous sons, a text whose Aramaic ancestor turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Sogdian portions of the Book of Giants, published by the Iranist Walter Henning in 1943, are part of the proof that Mani drew directly on Second Temple Jewish pseudepigrapha — and that this Mesopotamian apocryphon, having passed through Mani’s hands, was being read in an Eastern Iranian language in the deserts of China seven centuries later. The fuller story of this eastern church is told under Manichaeism in Central Asia and China; here the point is the vehicle. The religion moved because the Sogdians moved.

It moved, once, all the way onto a throne. In 762 or 763, the Uyghur ruler Bögü Qaghan, intervening in the Tang empire’s civil war, met four Manichaean clergy at Luoyang and took their faith back to the steppe. Under him Manichaeism became the state religion of the Uyghur Khaganate — the only Manichaean state in the history of the world — and the Sogdian community, already entrenched among the Uyghurs as scribes and merchants and advisers, was the conduit through which this happened. The conversion was commemorated in the 820s on the trilingual Karabalghasun Inscription, a stele raised at the Uyghur capital and inscribed in three scripts: Old Turkic runic, Chinese, and Sogdian. That a Mesopotamian religion should be proclaimed on a Mongolian steppe in an Iranian language is the entire Sogdian achievement compressed into a single monument.

The Church of the East

Christianity traveled the same wires. The Church of the East — the East Syriac communion that the West long called Nestorian, centered in Sasanian Persia and reaching beyond Rome’s frontier — pushed its mission down the Silk Road to India and to Tang China, and the Sogdians were among the peoples it gathered. North of Turfan, at a place called Bulayïq, German excavators found the library of a monastery: some eleven hundred fragments written in the Syriac script, in three languages — Syriac, Sogdian, and Old Uyghur. The liturgy was in Syriac, the heir of the Syriac Christian mysticism of the Mesopotamian homeland; but the great majority of the texts are in Sogdian, all of them translated from Syriac — psalters, lectionaries, lives of saints, the sayings of the desert fathers — the daily reading of a Christian community that prayed in the language of Edessa and understood it in the language of Samarkand. One bilingual fragment pairs Sogdian with Greek, hinting that Melkites as well as East Syrians used the monastery. Here too the Sogdian role is that of the translator-congregation: a faith born on the Euphrates, read in an Iranian vernacular, on the edge of China.

The persistence and the turn

For a span of centuries, then, the same merchant civilization sustained Zoroastrian temples in its home cities, Buddhist translators on its eastern routes, Manichaean monasteries among the Uyghurs, and Christian congregations near Turfan — frequently in the same towns, sometimes recorded in the same archives. No single doctrine united them; the unity was the network. The Sogdians did not synthesize the four faiths into one. They held them in parallel, the way a great entrepôt holds four currencies, and they moved each one wherever it was wanted.

The configuration ended where the network’s western anchor was cut. In the first decades of the eighth century the armies of the Umayyad Caliphate, under Qutayba ibn Muslim, governor of Khurasan, broke the Sogdian principalities: Bukhara fell in 709, Samarkand in 712, and the last organized resistance, led by Devashtich of Panjikent, was crushed soon after, his fortress archive at Mount Mug abandoned to the rock and recovered by archaeologists twelve centuries later. The conquest brought Islam, and over the following generations Samarkand and Bukhara were remade as centers of Islamic learning — the very cities that had brokered four religions becoming, in time, lamps of a fifth. Eastward, the Manichaean and Christian Sogdian communities outlived the homeland for a while, fading into the surrounding Buddhist and then Muslim populations of the Tarim through the tenth and eleventh centuries; the Sogdian language slid out of common use, surviving today only in Yaghnobi, spoken in a few high valleys of Tajikistan by the descendants of those who never came down to the towns.

Reading the Sogdians

The modern recovery of Sogdia owes most to the decipherment of the Sogdian Ancient Letters and to Étienne de la Vaissière’s synthesis of the merchant networks; the picture is built from documents the Sogdians dropped along their routes — at Dunhuang, Turfan, and Mount Mug — far more than from archives they kept at home. The cornerstone is Étienne de la Vaissière’s Histoire des marchands sogdiens (Paris, 2002), translated as Sogdian Traders: A History (Leiden: Brill, 2005), which assembled the Chinese, Iranian, and archaeological evidence into the first full economic history of the diaspora. For the documentary base, the standard entry points are in the Encyclopaedia Iranica: Nicholas Sims-Williams and Frantz Grenet on Sogdian trade and on the Ancient Letters, the cache Aurel Stein lifted from the watchtower west of Dunhuang and the oldest connected texts in the language. The University of Washington’s Silk Road project hosts an annotated translation of the Ancient Letters, and the Smithsonian’s Freer|Sackler digital project The Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Road gives a curated account of Nanai-vandak’s letter and the merchant world that produced it.

The religious corpus rests on the Berlin Turfan collection. Hans-Joachim Klimkeit’s Gnosis on the Silk Road: Gnostic Texts from Central Asia (San Francisco, 1993) remains the standard English anthology of the Iranian, Turkic, and Chinese Manichaean material in which the Sogdian fragments sit; the Manichaean Sogdian Book of Giants — the pieces Walter Henning edited as texts C, E, and G in “The Book of the Giants,” BSOAS 11 (1943) — is the documentary hinge linking Mani’s canon to Second Temple Jewish pseudepigrapha, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica article on the Book of Giants tracks its passage through Sogdian into Uyghur and Chinese. For the Christian layer, the same reference work surveys the Christian literature in Middle Iranian languages and the monastery library at Bulayïq, whose Sogdian translations from Syriac are the largest single deposit of East Syriac Christianity in an Iranian tongue. Behind all of it lies the philological labor of Sims-Williams, Yutaka Yoshida, Werner Sundermann, and Boris Marshak, the excavator of Panjikent — the scholars who turned a desert of fragments back into a civilization.

What the Sogdians built was not a state but a circuit, and the circuit’s work was the relay. Down a single chain of oasis colonies, kept open by merchants who could speak five languages and write three scripts, the goddess of Babylon reached the walls of Samarkand, the law of the Buddha reached the courts of China, the church of Mani reached a steppe throne, and the gospel of the East reached a monastery in the sands of Turfan. The letter that Nanai-vandak wrote in 313 never arrived; but the larger correspondence the Sogdians carried — between Mesopotamia and Mongolia, between India and the Tang, between four religions and the whole breadth of Asia — was delivered in full, and the deserts kept the receipts.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906; treats Manichaeism among the Gnosis)

→ Related: Zoroaster · Avesta · Buddhism · Manichaeism Religion Of Light · Central Asian Chinese Manichaeism · Mani · Church Of The East East Syrian Christianity · Sasanian Iranian Wisdom Tradition · Achaemenid Empire · China · Islam · Syriac Christian Mysticism