5989 Turcica 35 13 Comptrend

COMPTES RENDUS 323 Comptes Rendus Étienne DE LA VAISSIERE, Histoire des marchands sogdiens, Paris, Col- lège de France — Institut des hautes études chinoises, coll. Biblio- thèque de l'Institut des hautes études chinoises, vol. XXXII, 2002, 413 p. + 8 planches et 6 cartes. Given the wide interest of recent years in the so-called “∞Silk Route∞” across Inner Asia, this thorough study of a group which spearheaded these transcontinental commercial and cultural exchanges is most timely, especially as this group of the Sogdian merchants has never been isolated for study previously in any depth∞; moreover, as the author notes at the outset, the group is one of the few historically-attested entities along routes which have, from the viewpoint of material remains, left virtually no vestiges. Thus the Sogdian merchants are rightly regarded as key figures, over a period of almost fifteen centuries, in a whole nexus of commercial, cultural and religious connections spanning the Asian continent and connecting the three of the early centres of Old World civilisation, China, the Indian subcontinent and the Near East. Apart from conveying the material of trade, they played a leading role in introducing Buddhism to China in the 2nd — 3rd centuries A.D., and then four centuries later brought new faiths from the Near East, Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity, to Inner Asia and to Turkish and Chinese peoples∞; and it was from the merchants' base in Transoxiana and the neigh- bouring Iranian land of Khwarazm that the first missionaries went forth to the Turks bea- ring the new faith of islam. M. de La Vaissière has been facing the difficulties familiar to anyone essaying a wide- ranging theme of Inner Asian history, including the need for an immense battery of lin- guistic skills, in ancient and modern tongues, for a region which was linked with such dis- parate outside cultures as those of China, India and the Middle East. In earlier generations, not even such giants as Marquart and Pelliot could hope to encompass all these and to study the sources at first-hand, and the present author, whose skills are clearly impressive, nevertheless acknowledges that much of his work has had to be through the medium of translations by specialists in particular spheres. In any case, the relevant documentation is largely external. A scholar like S. D. Goiten could construct from the Cairo Geniza records a wonderfully-detailed picture of mediaeval Jewish commercial activities in the Mediterranean basin and the Red Sea region, with the modern outsider entering into the minds, the daily life and problems of the participants, known to Turcica, 35, 2003, pp. 323-373 324 COMPTES RENDUS us across the centuries by name and family, and we know a great deal about the legal and social mechanisms by means of which this trade was conducted. The Sogdian merchants, on the other hand, remain shadowy persons, largely nameless figures, and we possess only a handful of Sogdian documents which throw light on the practical procedures of their trading. Unless new documents turn up —admittedly by no means improbable in a region still so little explored as Inner Asia— the history of these merchants must be constructed largely from outside them. The “∞Sogdian Ancient Letters∞” stemming from Dunhuang and probably datable to the early 4th century A.D., and the documents from Mount Mug in the upper Zarafshan valley of Sogdia, from the period just before the Arab invasions, are thus extraordinarily precious for a book like this, and the author provides translated texts and commentaries on selected ones of these documents giving information on the network of trading posts which stretched from Bukhara and Samarqand through Lulan and Dunhuang in the eas- tern part of what is now Sinkiang through Gansu to Chang'an and Luyoang in China proper. Their information on Sogdian colonies in Northern China can be fleshed out from references in the Chinese annals, but there is also an information on Sogdian trade connections with the Buddhist lands of Bactria and Gandhara ruled by such dynasties as the Kushans and Hephtalites∞; and recent discoveries of inscriptions in the inaccessible valleys of the Indus headwaters, mentioning Sogdian traders who passed along these hazardous ways, and written in the Indian Brâhmî and KharoÒ†hî scripts, supplement the information already known. From such materials as these, plus the scattered mentions of the Sogdians in outside sources, extending in time up to MaÌmûd Kâshgharî's Arabic-Turkish dictionary, the Dîwân lughât al-turk from the last decades of the 11th century, the author has carefully constructed a picture of this trans-Asiatic commerce. Bales of silk, he points out, played a quasi-monetary role in Chinese society, where metalic coinage was of low intrinsic value and often insufficient in quantity, and the exportation of silk westwards, particularly under the Tang dynasty, went in considerable measure to finance Chinese imperial expan- sion through Sinkiang as far as Transoxiana, where the imperial army was famously chec- ked in 751 near Talas by the Arabs. But there were always other products than silk, such as lacquered wares and bronzes (especially mirrors), paper and possibly porcelain, if the testimony of Arabic sources from the caliphal period is to be interpreted as referring to overland and not sea-borne traffic. And conversely, the traffic was far from being one- way∞: to China and India there came from the Middle East and Levant cloth, gold and sil- ver wares, precious stones and glass ware, not forgetting slaves gathered from the Turkish and other peoples living along the Silk Route. The author also builds up an authoritative picture of the social and economic structure of the Sogdian merchant communities them- selves, including their use, first of Hellenistic-type coins, and then of Sasanid Persian sil- ver dirhams, until at least the end of the 7th century. Moving as the Sogdians did right across Inner Asia (whilst their Iranian kinsmen, the merchants of Khwarazm, conducted a commerce northwards into the Turkish steppes towards the Urals and Volta basin, achieving contacts with such early Turkish peoples as the Khazars and Bulgars), they necessarily interacted with Turkish peoples of the steppe and desert zones. Byzantine sources of the 6th century seem to attest the activities of Sogdo-Turkish merchants supplying the silk so much in demand for Byzantine court and ecclesiastical ceremonial∞; Sogdian and Khwarazmian traders must have carried Sasanid and Sogdian silverware both to the forest zones of Russia beyond the Urals and the Kha- COMPTES RENDUS 325 zar lands of the South Russian and northern Caucasus steppes, in both of which environ- ments several bowls with Sogdian inscriptions have been found. Further east, it seems to have been the Sogdian colonies in Gansu which first brought Sogdians into contact with the easternmost Turks, bringing Buddhism into what is now Mongolia, the older layers of which faith show Sogdian and Chinese influences. Above all, Sogdians were the catalysts of the celebrated conversion of the Uyghur Qaghan to Manichaeism at Luoyang in 762- 763, on the evidence of the trilingual Chinese-Turkish-Sogdian Qarabalghasun inscription, since both Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity had been implanted in Sogdia itself at least by the 5th or 6th centuries∞; some Chinese sources of the Tang period make Mani- chaeism the official religion of the hu, the non-Chinese, above all Sogdians, in China. The texts show that, subsequently, Sogdian merchant activity in Inner Asia gradually lost its impetus, and the Sogdian communities scattered along the Silk Route and within China became progressively absorbed by the local Turkish and Chinese communities. The process seems to have been especially clear in the Uyghur khanates, both before and after the key date in Uyghur fortunes of 840∞: an appreciable number of the Uyghur envoys to the Chinese court in the mid-10th century bear Sogdian family names. Further west, Semirechye was for long another region of Turkish-Sogdian fusion, with Nestorianism as a lively faith there, and Kâshgharî noted that, in the Qarakhanid capital of Balâsâghûn, in the Issik Kol basin of what is now the Kirgiz Republic, the population was bilingual in Turkish and Sogdian. Here and along the Silk Route proper, the use of Sogdian was a long time dying. William of Rubruck, en route for Qaraqorum in 1253 and passing through Cailac/Qayaligh in the Ili valley, mentions that the Nestorians of the region still had their own language for liturgical and literary purposes, and this must have been Sog- dian (thus assumed by P. Jackson and D. O. Morgan in their English translation of and commentary on Rubruck's travels, The mission of Friar William of Rubruck, London, 1990, 148 n. 3, and presumably in the 1993 French translation of C. Cl. and R. Kappler, mentioned by La Vaissière at p. 330 n. 144). M. de La Vaissière's study is an exhaustive, richly-documented one, which displays formidable erudition and is written in a clear, flowing style. Though focussed on the Sog- dians, his study is truly a multi-cultural one, and will surely be the standard work of refe- rence here, as opposed to the numerous popularising books on the Silk Route which have appeared in recent years. From the aspect of typography, the book is a joy to read∞; the maps are clear and informative, and the illustrations, depicting objets d'art and document facsimiles, of exemplary clarity. C. Edmund BOSWORTH Cahiers d'Asie centrale no 9, Études karakhanides, Tachkent-Aix-en- Provence, Institut français d'études sur l'Asie centrale — éditions Edisud, 2001, 302 p. For long regarded as a marginal dynasty of the Islamic world, with a dynastic chrono- logy and nomenclature which, on the evidence of the limited written sources and the more ample but confusing nusmimatic ones, seemed incapable of satisfactory resolution, the Qarakhanids have received only a limited attention from Islamic historians.

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