The Silk Road: A New History (23 page)

The first traces of the Sogdians in the archeological record come from the earliest levels of habitation at Samarkand, which date to the seventh century
BCE
. Writing several centuries later, the biographers of Alexander of Macedon commented on the ferocious resistance of the inhabitants of Marakanda, the Greek name for Samarkand, who ultimately surrendered to Alexander. After Alexander’s death, various dynasties took power, and, for much of the time, a confederation based in what is now Tashkent controlled the city.
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Until recently, scholars have thought that the abandoned mailbag that Aurel Stein unearthed near Dunhuang in 1907 was the earliest surviving body of Sogdian-language materials, but between 1996 and 2006 archeologists working at the site of Kultobe (near Chimkent on the river Aris) in southern Kazakhstan found ten scraps of baked brick plaques with Sogdian letters on them. After careful examination of these materials, Nicholas Sims-Williams, the world’s leading expert on the Iranian languages of Central Asia, has determined that they predate the mailbag letters. At least four Sogdian city-states existed at the time this wall was built, but the texts are so fragmentary that it is difficult to learn much from them.
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The eight Sogdian-language letters found by Stein are largely intact and thus far more informative. Stein discovered the abandoned mailbag 56 miles (90 km) northwest of Dunhuang. One of the letters was addressed to a resident of Samarkand, an indication that the letter carrier was on his way to Samarkand when the letters were lost. In 1907 Stein’s men unearthed the letters while exploring a series of watchtowers, spaced two miles (3.2 km) apart, built by different Chinese dynasties to defend the frontier. Twenty feet (6 m) or more high, these guard towers often were attached to small dwellings for the guards.
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At one tower, which Stein numbered T.XII.A (T for Tun-huang, a variant spelling of Dunhuang), Stein noticed nothing special and assigned a team to clear out the passageway while he went to explore another tower. When he returned in the evening, the workmen showed him what they had discovered: some colored silks, a wooden case, Chinese documents dating to the early first century
CE
, a piece of silk with Kharoshthi script on it from before 400
CE
, and “one small roll after another of neatly folded paper containing what was manifestly some Western writing.”
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The script resembled Aramaic, and Stein remembered that he had found other similar examples at Loulan. Only later was the unfamiliar script identified as Sogdian.

These eight sheets of paper proved to be extraordinarily revealing, even though the letters are difficult to decipher and many words are missing. The handful of the world’s scholars who can read Sogdian continue to debate the meaning of each sentence, even now still occasionally explicating a phrase that has puzzled everyone for the past century. Four of the five intact letters have been translated into English.
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Stein’s excavation methods were advanced for his day, but not perfect; his workmen did not record which materials they found at which level in the collapsed tower, a real problem, given that the letters were undated.

Crucially, one letter provides a clue to the time of composition: “And, sirs, the last emperor, so they say, fled from Luoyang because of the famine and fire was set to his palace and to the city, and the palace was burnt and the city destroyed. Luoyang is no more. Ye [Zhangde fu, Henan] is no more!”
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Attacks on Luoyang occurred in 190, 311, and 535. Most scholars of Sogdian concur that the letter refers to the events of 311 and was written in either 313 or 314.
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The author of the letter refers to the invading army as “Huns,” and indeed their leader, Shi Le (274–333), belonged to one of the peoples in the Xiongnu confederation. This is one of the main pieces of evidence linking the Xiongnu with the Huns of Central Asia who invaded Europe in the late 300s.
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The eight letters were not in envelopes but “folded up into neat little convolutes,” as Stein called them, measuring 3.5–5 inches (9–13 cm) long, 1–1.25 inches (2.5–3 cm) across. Although originating in different Chinese towns, the letter paper had similar dimensions, of roughly 15.5–16.5 inches (39–42 cm) by 9.5–9.75 inches (24–25 cm), suggesting that even then sheets of paper were made in standardized sheets—a rather rapid development given that paper came into widespread use in China only in the third century
CE
. Three letters were placed in individual silk bags; a fourth, letter 2 (shown at the beginning of this chapter), was in a silk bag with a linen covering that said “bound for Samarkand” but with no return address. The other letters were not addressed, suggesting that the person delivering them may have known the recipients for whom they were intended. Letters 1 and 3 were written by a woman living in Dunhuang to her mother and husband who probably lived in Loulan, while Letter 5 was sent from Wuwei.

Already in the early fourth century, the letters reveal, Sogdian communities existed in Luoyang, Chang’an, Lanzhou, Wuwei, Jiuquan, and Dunhuang. The second letter mentions settlements of forty Sogdians in one place and one hundred “freemen” from Samarkand in another (both locations unfortunately illegible); the Luoyang settlement included both Sogdians and Indians. As soon as a community of Sogdians reached a certain size, perhaps forty, they erected a fire temple. The
sabao
performed ritual functions, namely tending the fire altar and presiding over Zoroastrian festivals, and as headman adjudicated disputes.

In Iran Zoroastrianism evolved toward monotheism, with Ahura Mazda as the supreme deity, but in Sogdiana its adherents worshipped many deities, including Ahura Mazda.
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Zoroastrian teachings forbade both Chinese burial in the ground and Buddhist cremation since both were polluting: burial polluted the earth, and cremation polluted fire. Instead, the Zoroastrians exposed the corpses of the dead, allowing scavenging animals to clean the meat from the bones before burying them in clay urns, called ossuaries.

Miwnay, the Dunhuang woman who wrote letters 1 and 3, was abandoned by her husband and saddled with his debts. The list of the men she approached for assistance provides a capsule sketch of Sogdian society in exile. Miwnay turned to a councilor (apparently an official who collected taxes), a relative of her husband’s, and then to a third man, apparently a business associate. Each refused to help on the grounds that it was her husband’s obligation, not theirs. Finally, she approached the “temple-priest,” who promised a camel and a male escort.

Miwnay vents her frustration forcefully in her letter to her husband: “I obeyed your command and came to Dunhuang and did not observe my mother’s bidding or that of my brothers. Surely the gods were angry with me on the day when I did your bidding! I would rather be a dog’s or a pig’s wife than yours!”
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A postscript written by her daughter reports that the two poverty-stricken women were reduced to tending sheep. Stuck in Dunhuang for three years, Miwnay had five opportunities to leave with caravans but not enough money to pay the twenty staters she needed for her passage.

Scholars are not certain of the value of a stater. Did it weigh .42 ounces (12 grams), as some of the stater coins circulating at the time did? Or was it a much lighter coin of .02 ounces (.6 grams) of silver circulating in Samarkand? (This is just one of the many conundrums still facing Silk Road researchers.)

Far richer than Miwnay was the business agent who reported the fall of Luoyang. He had sufficient funds in Samarkand for him to authorize merchants handling his affairs to “take 1,000 or 2,000 staters out of the money” to assist an orphan in his care. In his letter, the business agent wrote to his boss in Samarkand about the different people he had hired in the Gansu towns of Jiuquan and Wuwei. His letter documents three levels in the company: the boss (a father and son in Samarkand); the agent (author of the letter), who supervises a network of weavers who work for them; and the weavers themselves.

Letter 2 also mentions some of the commodities being traded at the time, namely woolen cloths and linen. The agent reports that he has sent 32 “vesicles”—a unit of uncertain value—of musk to Dunhuang. Musk, processed from the glands of the musk deer, was used as a scent and as a fixative. According to Étienne de la Vaissière, a prominent historian of the Sogdians, the musk probably weighed 1.75 pounds (.8 kg), an enormous amount of pure musk.
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The second letter also mentions woolen cloths and linen but gives no quantities.

The fifth letter, from a more local level of commerce between Guzang and Dunhuang, is addressed to the caravan leader. It mentions much smaller amounts of money: the author claims that he received only four and a half staters from the twenty he was owed. He describes several goods being sent by caravan from Guzang to other destinations, most likely Loulan, some 900 miles (1,400 km) away: “white,” most likely ceruse, a cosmetic with a white lead base; pepper; silver; and “rysk,” a term whose meaning is not clear. Certain goods traveled great distances: pepper (letter 5) and camphor (letter 6) could be purchased only in Southeast Asia or India, while musk (letter 2) came from the Tibetan border with Gansu. In the sixth letter, only sections of which survive, the author asks the recipient to buy something, possibly “derived from the silkworm,” meaning silk cloth or thread. If this is not available, then the recipient is to purchase camphor instead. This is apparently the only mention of silk in the Sogdian letters.
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None of the quantities given in the Sogdian letters is certain, but most scholars concur that the amounts are small, most likely between 3.3 pounds (1.5 kg) and 88 pounds (40 kg).
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An animal, or a few animals, could easily have carried these amounts, suggesting that the Silk Road trade was a trade limited in scope, in what some scholars have called a “petty” trade.
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Source: Étienne de la Vaissière,
Histoire des Marchands Sogdiens
(Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 2002), Map 3.

The Sogdian Ancient Letters are significant because they are among the only Silk Road documents written by merchants, not by the authorities overseeing or taxing trade. They depict a diasporic group of Sogdians living peacefully as merchants, farmers, and even servants in lands still engaged in commerce and long-distance trade at a time when China was in chaos, with one dynasty having just fallen and another struggling to take over.

In the following centuries the Sogdians continued to speak their own language but modified their clothing and hairstyles to conform with the demands of their new, nomadic conquerors—the Huns, Kidarites, Hephthalites, and Turks, who gained control of Samarkand, sometimes with the assistance of the Sasanian empire (224–651), far to the west with their capital at Ctesiphon, near modern-day Baghdad. In 509 Samarkand fell to the Hephthalites, a confederation of Iranian and Turkic peoples who are occasionally called the White Huns and who lived in northern Afghanistan.
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Later, around 560, the Sasanians allied with the newly formed Turkish confederation to defeat the Hephthalites.
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After 565 Samarkand came under the rule of the Western Turks, which is why Xuanzang continued on to Samarkand after meeting the kaghan at Tokmak. Although the Turks developed a written language of their own in the eighth century, they often wrote in Sogdian, and cultural ties between the Turks and Sogdians were close.

During these centuries of frequent political shifts, the Sogdians gradually expanded out from Samarkand and Bukhara. In the fifth century and later, Sogdians put up Sogdian-style buildings and irrigation works as they designed new settlements around the Zerafshan River. Economic growth accelerated in the fifth century, and by the sixth and seventh century, Sogdiana had become the richest country in Central Asia, as demonstrated by the ever larger houses and more elaborate paintings found by archeologists at Panjikent.
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Panjikent, 37 miles (60 km) east of Samarkand in Tajikistan, is one of the most important archeological sites on the Silk Road, as first Soviet and now Russian archeologists from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg have been excavating the site every summer since 1947.
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Unlike many of the excavations in China, archeologists are not digging up individual tombs but painstakingly excavating a small city, house by house, quadrant by quadrant.