Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

part iv | migrations of cultures
Byzantine ship. Here they engaged in negotiations with the Byzantine emperor for
the delivery of Sogdian silk to Byzantium. Maniakh was accompanied by a Central
Asian Kholiatai. According to P. Lerch, the Kholiatai (Choalitoi) were Khorezmians.
Later, the Sogdians repeatedly crossed the Black Sea on Byzantine ships to
conduct a mutually beneficial trade in silk and other merchandise. The scholar V.I.
Abaev has made the interesting observation that the name Sudak, a town still located
on the eastern coast of the Crimean Peninsula, must have originally sounded like
Sogdak, which means ‘small Sogdian colony’.
It is possible that the appearance of such a name reflected the prominent role of
Sogdians not only in trade by caravan, but also in the maritime trade with Byzantium
on the Black Sea.
Recent finds in China and Japan seem to point directly to Sogdian involvement in
maritime trade in the Far East as well. Among them are two sandalwood fragments
with Pahlavi and Sogdian inscriptions, found hidden in the Horyu-ji temple in Nara,
the ancient capital of Japan. The Pahlavi inscription gives the name of the owner of
items or an intermediary in their sale. The Sogdian version has two words, apparently
referring to a measure of weight. The date that these objects arrived in Japan, indicated
in one of the inscriptions, is AD 761.
In the first half of the 1980s, during archaeological excavations in Canton
Province, near the Vietnamese border, Chinese scholars unearthed a clay vessel
containing drachmas of the Sassanian King Peroz (AD 459–481) along with other
silver and gold items, indicating the date of the burial of these items as the first half
of the 6th century AD. However, the most important find was a silver vessel with
an inscription that was originally described as Pahlavi or East Iranian. The Japanese
scholar and Sogdologist Yotaka Yoshida has established it as being of Sogdian origin.
He also translated the inscription as follows: ‘This vessel belongs to (…) from the
Chach people, (weight) 42 staters.’ There is also a tamga seal in the middle of the
inscription. Chach (Shash in Arabic) is the name of the area of present-day Tashkent
and adjacent areas. Notably, yet another silver vessel, found in 1908 in the village of
Kerchevo in the Urals, and now held by the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg
in Russia, also has a Sogdian inscription dating from the 4th century AD indicating
that it belonged to the ruler of Chach.
As a result of the discovery of these objects, a number of Chinese and Japanese
scholars have suggested that they point to the involvement of Sogdian merchants in
maritime trade between India and China in the early medieval period.
For example, the Japanese scholar Yajima Hikoichi believes that Sogdian
merchants used this route as early as the 7th–8th centuries AD for selling sandalwood
to China.
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