Forty-two figures, all representatives of the major powers, appear in the original wall painting of the ambassadors from Afrasiab, Samarkand. This reconstruction shows the surviving parts on a white background and the artist’s reconstruction on gray. The western wall illustrates the genuinely cosmopolitan world in which the Sogdians lived. Their immediate neighbors from what is now southern Uzbekistan and Tashkent appear, as do those from much more distant places like China and Korea. © 2010 F. Ory-UMR 8546-CNRS.
The importance of the Chinese is also clear from the northern wall, which shows Chinese women on a boat and a hunting scene.55 To the right of the empress’s boat is a vigorous hunting scene in which Chinese huntsmen spear leopards. The oversized figure on the right has to be the Chinese emperor, for Sogdian artistic convention portrayed only deities and monarchs as larger than life-size.56
The southern wall depicts a Zoroastrian ceremony complete with sacrificial victims (the four geese), two Zoroastrian dignitaries carrying clubs on camel-back, and a horse led by a Zoroastrian priest wearing a face-mask. This face mask, called a padam in Pahlavi, was a veil covering the nose and mouth to protect the fire altar from contact with body fluids. The ceremony could well be the Nauruz festival described by the calendrical expert al-Biruni, himself a native of Khorezm, the region northwest of Samarkand.57 (Even though it is non-Islamic, Nauruz is still today a major holiday across Central Asia and the Caucasus, and even in Iran.) Writing in the year 1000, several centuries after the Islamic conquest of the city, he recounts that the Persian king led his people in a six-day ceremony to celebrate the coming of spring and that the Sogdians celebrated the same festival in the summer.
The southern wall offers a parallel composition to the northern, but some of the figures in the procession have been effaced. Opposite the Chinese emperor is a white elephant, which probably carried the no-longer-visible Samarkand queen, while the figure on horseback at the end of the procession is the ruler of Samarkand, Varkhuman himself.
The Afrasiab paintings give paramount importance to interactions with the outside world, especially envoys. These diplomats are shown engaging in tradelike activities, but they are actually presenting real-life commodities such as silk cloth
and silk thread. In the middle of the seventh century Varkhuman portrayed the peoples belonging to the Sino-Turkish alliance.58 His painters gave the Chinese pride of place, as befitted their role as the most important ally of the Sogdians.
But the political orientation of Samarkand—and all of Central Asia—was about to undergo a seismic shift. Following the death of Muhammad in 632, the Arabs under the leadership of the Rightly Guided Caliphs and then the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750) conquered north Africa, southern Spain, and Iran. After defeating the Sasanians in 651, they continued to move east through Central Asia, and targeted Samarkand. They took the city for the first time in 671, and in 681 an Arab governor was able to spend his first winter in the region.59 Between 705 and 715, the Arab general Qutayba ibn Muslim campaigned in Sogdiana and in 712 conquered Samarkand.
The largest group of Sogdian-language documents found in Sogdiana—and not in western China—date to this period. In 1933 Soviet archeologists uncovered an extraordinary cache of nearly one hundred documents at Mount Mugh, 75 miles (120 km) east of Samarkand in Tajikistan.60 These documents offer a unique account of the Islamic conquest from the vantage point of the conquered—and not the conquering—peoples. In capturing one ruler’s desperate negotiations with Turks, Chinese, and other local rulers in his last-ditch efforts to keep the Islamic armies at bay, they remind us that the Islamic conquest of Central Asia was slow and uncertain, and the Chinese of the Tang dynasty played a difficult-to-discern role in the region’s politics in the early eighth century.
The documents at Mount Mugh were found by local people, not by a foreign expedition. In czarist times, the residents of the village of Kum, some 4 miles (6 km) away, knew that the hilltop held some kind of treasure. In the spring of 1932 a few local shepherd boys visited the site. They dug around in a pit, unearthed several documents on leather, put the others back, and brought the most complete piece back to their village.61 The local Communist Party secretary, Abdulhamid Puloti, who had studied history in Tashkent, got wind of the find and promised a villager a job as a policeman in return for help in finding the documents. When Puloti was finally taken to a villager’s house, the host reached into a hollow section between the wall and a door post and pulled out a document. Puloti alerted his superiors, who in turn informed the cultural authorities, and the document, later numbered 1.I, was transferred to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.62 The document was confiscated by the first secretary of the Communist Party in Tajikistan, D. Husejnov, and disappeared after 1933 when he was purged.63
Like many Asian peoples, the Sogdians dated documents by the reign year of a given ruler; many of the Mugh documents were dated between the first and fourteenth years of the ruler Devashtich (a more technical romanization is Dēwāštīč). But because the years of Devashtich’s reign were unknown, scholars
could not assign a precise date. Of the ninety-seven documents found at Mount Mugh, ninety-two are written in Sogdian, three in Chinese, one in Arabic, and one in Runic script in a language not yet identified.64 One of the Chinese documents was dated 706, suggesting that the documents probably dated to the early years of the eighth century.65
The sole Arabic document proved to be the key to dating the documents, as the great Soviet Arabist I. Y. Kratchkovsky (1883–1951) explains in his memoirs.66 In the letter, Devashtich writes to the Arab governor of Khurasan, al-Jarrah in perfect Arabic, which suggests that he hired a scribe. Identifying himself as a mawla, or client, of the governor, he offers to send the two sons of Tarxun, the previous ruler of Samarkand, to the governor for safekeeping.67 When he read the letter, Kratchkovsky remembered that the great historian al-Tabari had written about a landed noble (diqhan) from Samarkand named Divashni, who had resisted the Islamic conquest between 721 to 722.68 Divashni, Kratchkovsky realized, was a scribal error for Divashti, one of several Arabic renderings of the name Devashtich.
That crucial identification made it possible to date the Mount Mugh documents to 709–22.
In response to the news of the discovery, the Academy of Social Sciences in Leningrad sent an expedition to Tajikistan headed by A. A. Freiman (1879–1968), the leading Soviet scholar of Sogdian. For two weeks in November 1933, Freiman led a team from the Academy of Sciences who excavated the site.69 It was the ideal location for a fortress: the Kum and Zerafshan rivers surrounded it on three sides, and the residents had constructed inner and outer walls for further protection.
The fortress held only a few large clay pots to store water, a clear indication that its residents depended on the people of the nearby village to carry water a quarter of a mile (0.5 km) from the nearest creek. Too small to house an army unit, the citadel was designed to be the home of the ruler who lived inside with a few family members and servants, but, when necessary, its large rooms and courtyard could temporarily house one hundred families.