Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

3.1
Sogdian inscriptions on the bricks and arches of gateways found at the site
of Kultobe in the Chimkent region of Southern Kazakhstan date back to the first
centuries AD. The British scholar N. Sims-Williams translated the inscriptions. They
contain crucial information about the erection of the city (an outpost) against nomads
by a coalition of rulers from Sogdian areas of Samarkand, Kish, Nakhshab, Nawakmethan
(Bukhara) under the command of the leader of the army of ‘Chachannap’, to
whom this city belonged. Interestingly, in this inscription, as in the legends on coins
and inscriptions on silver vessels from Kerchevo and southeast China, the name
‘Chach’ is rendered as č’č’n’p – Chachannap (lit. the ‘Chach people, community,
country’). This author, believes that this is not just a term denoting belonging to the
Chach people, but the official name of the state: Chachannap.
Many more Sogdian manuscripts have been found in Xinjiang. These are
translations into Sogdian of Buddhist, Manichaean and Christian religious texts
written in black ink on leather, birch bark and other materials. The few fragments
of literary works in Sogdian are of particular interest. Among them is a manuscript
fragment of 16 incomplete lines describing an episode in which the epic hero Rustam
fights the devas, and several fragments of manuscripts with Sogdian translations of
tales about a merchant, a pearl borer and three fish.
Rock inscriptions left by Sogdian pilgrims on their journeys to holy places as
well as those of merchants and messengers are distinctive examples of Sogdian
writing. These travellers often inscribed their names on cliffs, sometimes including
a date, as if to prove that they had visited the places. Such inscriptions have been
found in Mongolia, Semirechye, Tibet and India. For example, Noshfarn, a Sogdian
Christian from Samarkand, left an inscription on a rock in Ladakh on the border of
Tibet and Kashmir.
A remarkable discovery was made by the German archaeologist K. Jettmar in
the upper reaches of the Indus. Here, near the Shatial Bridge, along the Karakorum
highway, are steep cliffs with numerous short inscriptions in Sogdian, which were
made by ‘visitors’ to the area. Studies by H. Humbach and N. Sims-Williams have
demonstrated that these were made either by Sogdian pilgrims on their way to India
to worship at Buddhist shrines, or by Sogdian merchants from different regions of
Central Asia. Scholars have dated some of these inscriptions to the 3rd or even 2nd
century AD, on the basis of the distinctive features and shapes of the letters, and they
are, in fact, not only among the oldest Sogdian inscriptions to have been found, but
are also the earliest Sogdian rock inscriptions that have been discovered. Based on
the nisbas (an adjective that indicates a person’s place of origin) of the inscriptions,
scholars have been able to establish that the Sogdian authors of these inscriptions
came from Maimargh (near Samarkand) and Chach (the modern Tashkent Oasis).
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