Central Asia in World History

by Peter B. Golden

  Regionally, Khotan dominated the south and Kashghar the west. Khotanese legends trace the city’s origins to the milieu of Ashoka, the Indian ruler who adopted Buddhism in the third century BCE. Indian-Buddhist influences remained strong and Indians were the second-largest grouping of the population, after the Iranian Saka. Khotan was a center for white and green jade and silk. According to local legends depicted on murals, the silk worms were smuggled into Khotan in the elaborate coiffure of a second century CE Chinese princess (other accounts say she was a princess from Kucha) who had been sent to marry the Khotanese ruler.5 Xuanzang, who records this tale, reports that Khotan’s inhabitants were urbane Buddhists with a love of music and dance. They also had some unusual practices. For instance, they had built a temple to make offerings to the local rats, large silver or golden-colored beasts. According to local lore, the Khotanese king, faced with a “Xiongnu” attack, appealed to the rats for aid against the invaders, who were camped on the rat mounds outside the city. A giant rat appeared to the King in a dream and agreed to help. The rats then chewed through the leather armor, horse gear, and bowstrings of the Xiongnu, guaranteeing a victory for the Khotanese.6 A painting of what a British traveler called a “rat-headed divinity” was taken from the area and is now found in the collections of the British Museum.7

  Kucha, Agni, and Qocho were substantial city-states inhabited by peoples who spoke Tokharian until at least the eighth century. Their economy combined agriculture, livestock breeding, and handicrafts production. They exported foodstuffs, wine, silk, textiles, felt, jade, and cosmetics. The whole of this region experienced profound cultural influences from China and India. The range of languages and scripts used in these crossroads of Eurasia was extraordinary. Documents and inscriptions have been found in Chinese, Tibetan, Turkic, Tokharian, Indic, Greek, Armenian, various Semitic, Iranian, and lesser-known languages.

  In Transoxiana, the Türks were the dominant power until 650, although their rule was sometimes indirect. Of the local city-states, only Khwarazm, under its king the Khwârazmshâh, had a centralized state. The Sogdians formed a more decentralized union. Bukhara and Samarkand shared a common royal house: the Jamûg.8 The “Lord of Bukhara” had a camel-shaped throne, surely a reference to the importance of the caravan trade to their economy. Occasionally, accounts mention a “King of Sogdia,” who, at best, was a “first among equals.” Although rulers enjoyed little real power, the History of Bukhara, written by Narshahkî in the 940s, describes a royal court rich in pomp and ceremony. In the early eighth century, just prior to the Arab conquest, the Khâtûn (queen), mother of the underage “Lord of Bukhara,” Tughshâda, governed. She held court sitting on her throne while slaves, eunuchs, and nobles gathered before her. Two hundred “youths girded with gold belts and swords carried (on the shoulder)” daily came from the countryside to serve her. She dispensed justice in the morning, went to her castle for lunch (sending trays of food to her “entire retinue”), and then resumed her court in the afternoon until sunset.9

  Narshakhî claims that Bukhara had 1000 shops, among which he notes the “green grocers’ stalls” next to the city walls and the “pistachio shellers” who were near them. The “spice sellers” were in yet another region and a gate was named after them. Walls separated the city’s districts and one passed through gates that connected the different sections.

  Beneath the ruler there were three classes or estates: nobles, merchants, and common folk. In contrast with neighboring Sâsânid Iran, which had earlier extended its power here, there was no great gulf between the nobles who lived in castles and the merchant-princes whose homes and estates were equally models of luxury. The Bukharan Kashkath clan was typical of these wealthy and powerful merchants. According to Narshakhî, after the Arab conquerors of Bukhara “solicited” some of their homes, the Kashkath built “seven hundred villas outside the town,” each of which had its own garden, park, and servants’ quarters.10 To guard themselves, Sogdian rulers and high nobles had their own châkar units, highly trained elite soldiers, whom they supported, educated, and even fictively adopted to ensure their loyalty. They were noted for their bravery. Some of them may be depicted on palace wall paintings in Samarkand. The châkar units were recruited mainly from the common folk.11 Such military retinues were common in the warrior societies across ancient and medieval Europe and Central Asia. Far from the courts of the powerful were the peasants who worked the land. Although mostly technically free, they were often under the power of a dihqân (land-owning aristocrat). Because of debt some of the peasants were forced into a status resembling that of the serfs of Medieval Europe.

  Sogdia’s far-flung contacts created a cosmopolitan, highly sophisticated, and cultured society, one characterized by a commercial, secular outlook.12 While interested in and tolerant of different religions, Sogdians were also very much caught up in the things of this world. This is evident in the extraordinary wall paintings that have been preserved in the ruins of the Sogdian city of Panjîkand (also spelled, Penjikent, Pendzhikent). It was briefly the capital of Dêwâshtîch, a ruler who titled himself the “King of Sogdia.” Many of the homes, including those of the less well-to-do, were decorated with wall paintings and other artwork reflecting a blending of cultures. For example, one wall is decorated with paintings of the tale of the goose that laid the golden eggs, well known to readers of Aesop’s fables. Another room has a female orchestra attired in Chinese clothing. Yet others depict tales, with many variants known in India and China, of swindling in business ventures13—themes known all too well to Sogdian merchants.

  There are statues of Iranian deities such as Anahid, a goddess of fertility, who is shown holding fruit. There are representations of animals following traditions that go back to the Scythian “animal style.” There are woodcarvings of figures in flowing attire that appear to be inspired by Indian art There are also works of monumental sculpture, again religious in theme. Wonderful examples of these sculptures could also be found in neighboring Bactria. The most famous of these, perhaps, were the giant statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

  All of these urban cultures produced a considerable literature, much but not all of which was religious in content. Some told didactic moral stories. There is a tale much like the biblical story of Job about a man who gains great wealth and has many wives and children on whom he lavishes spectacular wedding feasts. He is much admired by his fellow-townsmen. Then his life falls apart. His children and grandchildren die and he loses everything. He is so reduced in social standing that even the slave-girls are above him. Unfortunately, we do not know how the story ends, as only a fragment has survived.14 Secular documents include epic tales, love stories, law codes, and government correspondence such as the archives of Dêwâshtîch found on Mt. Mugh. Literacy was fairly widespread. Merchants, of course, needed to keep records of their commerce, routes, and products. Less formal writing has been found in the countryside, where common folk wrote on everyday objects such as clay utensils, as well as on walls.

  The mix of cultures is most clearly reflected in religions. In sharp contrast to the medieval Near East and Europe, Sogdia had no state religion and widely practiced toleration. Manichaean, Christian, and Buddhist texts written in Sogdian testify to the breadth of their interests. Buddhism was still widespread in the neighboring former Kushan-Hephthalite territory, co-existing with the worship of many local gods and goddesses, such as the cult of the Amu Darya (Oxus River). Central Asian cities near China, such as Kucha, Qocho, and Khotan, had already been Buddhist for several centuries. These cities were noted for their Buddhist scholarship and translators of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese, Khotanese Saka, and Tokharian. One of the early principal translators into Chinese was Kumarajiva, a Tokharian nobleman from Kucha. Chinese Buddhists came here for study.

  Xuanzang and later Chinese travelers found only a few remnants of Buddhism in Sogdia proper, where it was probably never strong. He states that the ruler and peop
le of Samarkand were fire worshippers. The city had “two religious foundations” (meaning Buddhist temples), “but no priests dwell in them.”15 The Tang shu, however, says that “they honor the Buddhist religion; they make sacrifices to the god of the heavens.”16 The latter was a reference to Mazdaism. Overall, Buddhism fared better in the Sogdian colonies in the East. In addition to pre-Zoroastrian cults focusing on natural elements (fire, water, earth, air), Sogdians and Khwarazmians venerated the mythical Iranian hero, Siyâvûsh, who was associated with birth, death, and rebirth. The people of Bukhara believed that he built their citadel and sacrificed a rooster in his memory annually, before dawn on Nawrûz, the Iranian New Year’s Day (corresponding to the spring equinox in late March). Nawrûz is still widely celebrated in Iran and Central Asia.

  Mazdaism had many local variants in Iranian-speaking Central Asia, but without the state-supported priestly hierarchy typical of Zoroastrian Iran. People worshipped a wide array of deities, including individual, family, local, and regional cults. Neighbors often had different favorite gods, which their families considered their special patrons. Bukharans also worshipped a Mother Goddess, Anahid (Persian Anahita), Gopatshah, a god with a human head and an ox’s body, who was considered the primal force that produced life; and others. The Persian Zoroastrian chief god, the leader of the good, Ahura Mazda, appears in Sogdia as Khurmazta Bagh (the “god Khurmazta”). Sogdian gods also included Zarvana, sometimes called the “king of the gods,” Washeghn, or Wishaghn (Persian: Verethraghna, god of victory), Nanaiya (a non-Iranian, Mesopotamian or Elamite goddess whose cult had spread among Zoroastrians), Parn (“good fortune,” “royal glory”) and others known to the larger Iranian world along with Shimnu, the leader of the forces of evil (Ahriman of Zoroastrian Persian tradition). Weijie, a Sui emissary to the “Western Countries,” in 610 tells of a Sogdian cult devoted to a celestial deity, whose divine child died in its seventh month. Its devotees, dressed in black, engaged in lamentations every seventh month, while searching the countryside for the divine infant. The Sogdians also venerated their ancestors, making offerings of food and cutting their faces in mourning at the end of the year.17

  A deva in Buddhism was a supernatural being or deity. This deva was found in Tumshuk, a medieval Buddhist center in modern Xinjiang, China. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York

  Many Sogdian settlements have the word vaghn/vaghan (-baghn, -faghn, “temple”) in their names, indicating that they were clustered around temples. Al-Bîrûnî, the eleventh-century Khwarazmian polymath and author in Arabic of important works on history, geography, philosophy, theology, mathematics, calendrical systems, and astronomy, notes a number of Sogdian and Khwarazmian festivals that were clearly associated with local Zoroastrianism. For example, there was a feast which fell on the fifteenth day of the month of Basâkanaj (the fourth month of the Sogdian year) that allowed people to again eat leavened bread after having abstained, for an unnoted period of time, from eating or drinking anything that had been touched by fire. At a mid-year holiday on the second day of the month of Faghakân, people gathered in the fire temples and ate a special dish made of millet, butter and sugar.18 Unfortunately, al-Bîrûnî does not explain what role these feasts (many of the names of the holidays contain the word khwâra, “eating”) played in the religion.

  The widespread devotion to idols clearly distinguishes Central Asian Zoroastrianism from its idol-lacking Persian form. The idols, made of wood and clay, were bedecked with jewels and precious stones. Chinese accounts, such as the Sui shu, mention a golden idol associated with the spirit “Desi” in the region of Ishtikhan (called “Cao” in Chinese) in Sogdia to which people, sometimes as many as one thousand at a time, made daily sacrifices of five camels, ten horses, and one hundred sheep.19 The cult of Desi was widespread. The origins and precise functions of these idols within the local religious systems are not always clear. Some may reflect Hindu and Buddhist influences. The idols were so numerous that when the Arabs conquered Samarkand they burned a stacked pile of them that reached as high as a castle.

  According to Chinese accounts, on New Year’s Day the king and people of Kang (Sogdia) put on new clothes and cut their hair and beards. They held an archery contest on horseback for seven days in a forest near the capital. Whoever hit the target (a gold coin mounted on a sheet of paper) became king for a day.20 In Ferghana, the contests were less friendly. There, two champions, each representing rival aristocratic factions, fought to the death. This would determine whether it would be a good year or a bad one.21

  In addition to Buddhism and local cults, there were followers of Nestorian Christianity, which accented the human nature of Christ. They were in the entourage of the Persian Shah Kavad when he fled briefly to Central Asia. Some remained to carry on missionary work. Nestorianism reached China through Central Asia in 635. From their base in Merv, the Nestorians established a center in Samarkand in the early sixth century, successfully proselytizing among Turkic and subsequently Mongol tribes. The Turkic war prisoners whom the Persians sent to Constantinople in the 590s, who had crosses tattooed on their foreheads as talismans against plague, may have been their converts. By the seventh century, Samarkand had a metropolitan. In many respects, after the Muslims, Nestorians became the most successful religious community in this region. Sogdian merchants, as with other religions, also served as missionaries.

  The Arabo-Islamic conquests in Central Asia and elsewhere stemmed from a variety of motivations: religious fervor, land hunger, war booty, and a diversion from the growing strife in the Islamic heartlands. Muslims entered Mâ warâ’nahr, “that which is beyond the (Oxus) river,” the Arabic rendering of Transoxiana, after the death of the last Sasanid monarch, Yazdigard III, felled by a unknown assassin in 651, and Iran’s submission to the Arabs. This was part of larger Arab offensives which the Umayyad caliphs (ruling 661–750), the eventual successors of Muhammad (d. 632), and political leaders of the expanding Muslim state, directed against the Khazars, a Türk successor state in the north Caucasus; the western Türks in Transoxiana; and the Berbers of North Africa. Arab armies advanced to Afghanistan and raided across the Oxus, the dividing line between Central Asia and the Middle East, into Sogdia, which had been under loose western Türk rule. China replaced the Türks in 659 as the Arabs began their raids. By the 690s, the western Türks had revived, and a complicated situation developed in which China, Tibet, the Türks, and the Arabs competed for control.

  In 705, Qutaiba ibn Muslim, the Umayyad commander in the east, transformed Arab raids into wars of conquest. In the political checkerboard that extended from the Oxus to China, Qutaiba skillfully exploited local Sogdian and Türk rivalries. Some Sogdian merchants in Merv even helped to finance the Arab expeditions. It was good business and they received their share. In quick succession, Qutaiba took Bukhara, Khwarazm, and Tokharistan (in Afghanistan). By 712, he was ready to deal with Samarkand.

  Ghûrak, the ruler of Samarkand, was under siege. The Arabs ambushed a special force of Sogdian nobles and warriors sent to relieve the city. They cut off the heads of the slain, wrote their names on their ears, attached them to their belts, and returned, thus bedecked, to Qutaiba. Word of the disaster soon spread and resistance crumbled. Ghûrak, with no hope of succor, surrendered. In the treaty of 712, the Arabs recognized—or perhaps bestowed on him—the title of King of Sogdia. It was in their interest to set up a ruler who was under their thumb. The Arabs, having defeated an eastern Türk army in 713, considered their control over Sogdia and Khwarazm secure.

  The Muslim conquerors suffered from their own domestic political disputes. Qutaiba, feeling vulnerable, revolted and perished in 715. Arab hegemony in Transoxiana immediately buckled. The western Türk attempt to reassert their independence from their eastern kinsmen after the death of Qapaghan Qaghan in 716 further complicated the situation. The Sogdians, sensing an opportunity, staged a major revolt against the Arabs in 719. Dêwâshtîch, who also claimed to be king, sided with the rebels. />
  The Mount Mugh documents give us a brief glimpse into the era. In one letter to Dêwâshtîch “the lord, Sire, the great bulwark, the Sogdian king,” written just as the Arabs were reasserting their authority, the writer, “the worthless slave Fatufarn,” an agent of Dêwâshtîch, reports that he has brought letters to the rulers of Châch (Tashkent), Ferghana and others as well as information that was too sensitive to be written down, but which he duly reported “orally, fully without omission.” From Ustrushâna (another Sogdian statelet), “I did not hear any good news. Even the country of Ustrushâna has been completely evacuated. And my lord, I am alone without a companion and, my lord, I did not venture to go.”22 Rumors were swirling that other lands had reached agreements with the Arabs. Regrettably, only bits and pieces of this dramatic correspondence have survived. The Arabs captured and crucified Dêwâshtîch in 722. Meanwhile, Ghûrak juggled alliances with the Arabs and the Türks. The Arab hold remained uncertain. By 728 it was reduced only to Samarkand and a few other regions. Sogdian rebels found willing allies in the Türks and Tibetans.

  As Arab rule faltered, the western Türks revived under Sulu of the Türgesh tribe, who had muscled aside the nominal western Türk qaghan. The Türgesh formed alliances with Tibet and occasionally with the Arabs or with anti-Arab Sogdians as the constantly changing circumstances dictated. Western Türk-Türgesh incursions into Xinjiang worried the Tang, who encouraged divisions among the Türks, pitting Sulu against the qaghan. Tibetans, Türgesh, and Arab rebels joined to threaten Muslim rule beyond the Oxus. The great prize of this clash of empires and their local allies was control of the Transoxanian Silk Road.