25 Facts About Sogdians

Sogdians lived in Imperial China and rose to prominence in the military and government of the Chinese Tang dynasty.

Similar to how the Yuezhi offered tributary gifts of jade to the emperors of China, the Sogdians are recorded in Persian records as submitting precious gifts of lapis lazuli and carnelian to Darius I, the Persian king of kings.

The Hephthalites took on the role of major intermediary on the Silk Road, after their great predecessor the Kushans, and contracted local Sogdians to carry on the trade of silk and other luxury goods between the China Empire and the Sasanian Empire.

Archaeological remains suggest that the Turks probably became the main trading partners of the Sogdians, as appears from the tomb of the Sogdian trader An Jia.

However, when his successor al-Jarrah ibn Abdallah governed Khorasan, many native Sogdians, who had converted to Islam, began to revolt when they were no longer exempt from paying the tax on non-Muslims, the jizya, because of a new law stating that proof of circumcision and literacy in the Quran was necessary for new converts.

Related searches

The Sogdians established a trading network across the 1500 miles from Sogdiana to China.

The Sogdians had learnt to become expert traders from the Kushans, together with whom they initially controlled trade in the Ferghana Valley and Kangju during the 'birth' of the Silk Road.

Sogdians played a major role in facilitating trade between China and Central Asia along the Silk Roads as late as the 10th century, their language serving as a lingua franca for Asian trade as far back as the 4th century.

Sogdians recorded the Sogdians working in other capacities such as farmers, carpetweavers, glassmakers, and woodcarvers.

Shortly after the smuggling of silkworm eggs into the Byzantine Empire from China by Nestorian Christian monks, the 6th-century Byzantine historian Menander Protector writes of how the Sogdians attempted to establish a direct trade of Chinese silk with the Byzantine Empire.

Many Sogdians lived in Luoyang, capital of the Jin Dynasty, but fled following the collapse of the Jin Dynasty's control over northern China in 311 AD and the rise of northern nomadic tribes.

Valerie Hansen asserts that around this time and extending into the Tang Dynasty, the Sogdians "became the most influential of the non-Chinese groups resident in China".

Sogdians continued as active traders in China following the defeat of the rebellion, but many of them were compelled to hide their ethnic identity.

Sogdians living in Turfan under the Tang dynasty and Gaochang Kingdom engaged in a variety of occupations that included: farming, military service, painting, leather crafting and selling products such as iron goods.

The Sogdians had been migrating to Turfan since the 4th century, yet the pace of migration began to climb steadily with the Muslim conquest of Persia and Fall of the Sasanian Empire in 651, followed by the Islamic conquest of Samarkand in 712.

Where the Sogdians moved in considerable numbers, their language made a considerable impact.

For instance, it is clear that Buddhist Sogdians incorporated some of their own Iranian deities into their version of the Buddhist Pantheon.

Sogdians spoke an Eastern Iranian language called Sogdian, closely related to Bactrian, Khwarazmian, and the Khotanese Saka language, widely spoken Eastern Iranian languages of Central Asia in ancient times.

However, the Sogdians epitomized the religious plurality found along the trade routes.

The largest body of Sogdian texts are Buddhist, and Sogdians were among the principal translators of Buddhist sutras into Chinese.

Sogdians practiced Manichaeism, the faith of Mani, which they spread among the Uyghurs.

Sogdians's claim is confirmed by a Chinese text of the 14th century explaining how a Sogdian named Mar-Sargis from Samarkand founded six Nestorian Christian churches there, in addition to one in Hangzhou during the second half of the 13th century.

Central Asians like Sogdians were called "Hu" by the Chinese during the Tang dynasty.

The Japanese historian Ikeda on wrote an article in 1965, outlining the history of the Sogdians inhabiting Dunhuang from the beginning of the 7th century, analyzing lists of their Sinicized names and the role of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism in their religious life.

Yoshida Yutaka and Kageyama Etsuko, Japanese ethnographers and linguists of the Sogdian language, were able to reconstruct Sogdian names from forty-five different Chinese transliterations, noting that these were common in Turfan whereas Sogdians living closer to the center of Chinese civilization for generations adopted traditional Chinese names.

Related searches