Histoire des marchands sogdiens.

• Author: Golden, Peter B.
• Position: Book Review

Histoire des marchands sogdiens. By ETIENNE DE LA VAISSIERE. Bibliotheque de l'Institut des Hautes Etudes Chinoises, vol. 32. Paris: COLLEGE DE FRANCE, BIBLIOTHEQUE DE L'INSTITUT DES HAUTES ETUDES CHINOISES, 2002. Pp. 413, plates, maps.

From their homeland in what is today Uzbekistan, Sogdian merchants established colonies that dotted the Silk Road from Gansu to the Crimea. Constituting one of the most extraordinary trading diasporas in world history, they were bearers of goods (silks and precious stones in particular), cultures, and religions across Eurasia. In addition to their local Mazdaism, Sogdian devotees of Manichaeanism, Nestorian Christianity, and Buddhism spread these faiths to the Turkic peoples and China. In return, their own culture was enriched by influences stemming from other Iranian peoples, the Indic world, China, and the Turks.

The Sogdian script based on Syriac and associated with one or another of these religions also made its way to the Turks, thence to the Mongols, and ultimately to the Manchus. Sogdian (surviving today only in Yaghnobi) was the lingua franca of the northern Silk Road, leaving behind graffiti as far away as the Indus valley. Middle Turkic terms pertaining to religious concepts (e.g., ucmaq 'Heaven' < Sogd. 'wstmg), urban life (e.g., kend 'town' < Sogd. kndh), viniculture (e.g., bekini 'wine from millet' < Sogd. bg'ny), weights and measures (e.g., batman 'unit of measurement' < Sogd. ptm'n), etc., attest to its influence on the Turks. Eastern Turkistan, one of their areas of settlement, has preserved remnants of the rich Sogdian religious literature. (1) This was a culture which Richard Frye has characterized as "mercantile secularism," syncretistic, interested in and tolerant of a variety of confessions. (2) Their openness to the cultures with which they came into contact also played a role, de la Vaissiere maintains (p. 9), in the shaping of the Central Asian Islamic intellectual world (cf. al-Biruni, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and al-Khwarazmi--a number of these figures were actually Khwarazmians, but Khwarazm was part of the larger economic and culture network of Sogdia). Cultural fusion also found expression in the extraordinary artwork depicting gods, heroes, Aesops' fables, folk tales, etc., in the lavish palaces of the nobles and leading merchants. (3)

The Sogdians were loosely organized into a series of city-states ruled by kings (often little more than a primus inter pares). Samarkand was probably the most powerful of these statelets. Paykand, the famed "city of merchants," was ruled collectively by the merchants (pp. 163-65). The role of the cakars, the personal guard corps of the great merchants and nobles, in the shaping of the ghulam/mamluk institution of the Islamic Middle East (4) is only one of a number of issues concerning the complex social structure of the Sogdian world that requires further elucidation. (5) Much of the work done thus far has focused on philology and art. The Mount Mugh documents (the archives of the early eighth-century Sogdian lord of Panjikant, Dewashtich) and the fragments of personal and commercial correspondence along the Silk Road give us a glimpse into the world that the Sogdians themselves saw. The scattered and fragmentary nature of the historical material in a daunting array of languages has delayed, thus far, a full-length study of the Sogdians, long one of the major desiderata of Inner Asian studies. In de la Vaissiere's volume under review here, we have a work that does much to achieve that goal.

Sogdian commerce itself has not been studied in any systematic fashion. Hence, the author's primary focus is the Sogdian merchant the origins, chronology, and scope of his commerce. Included also are discussions of his social standing in Sogdian and host societies, the process of...