Bukhara

Ānguó (安國), “the state of An,” is the Tang name for Bukhara. The dynastic histories catalogue the Sogdian city-states as the “nine clans of Zhaowu,” assigning each principality a single-character Chinese surname: Kang for Samarkand, An for Bukhara, Shi, Cao, Mi, and the rest for their neighbors, a whole foreign region rendered as a family register. Sogdians who settled in China took these surnames as their own, so a Bukharan merchant in Chang’an was surnamed An, exactly as his Samarkandi partner was surnamed Kang; the account of the Western Regions describes the An state’s walls, its trade, and its embassies to the Tang court.

The system produced one of history’s sharpest ironies of nomenclature, and the entry should not look away from it. The general An Lushan, whose rebellion of 755 broke the Tang dynasty’s back, bore the Bukharan surname, his father’s people being Sogdians of the An state; the city’s Chinese name is therefore written into the catastrophe that ended China’s central Asian ambitions and, with them, the Sogdian trading world itself. No other naming convention on this atlas swallowed a people so completely into another’s bureaucracy: Bukhara entered China as a surname, and the surname made history that unmade Bukhara’s world. Filing systems are never neutral; this one changed hands from the ledger to the battlefield.

Bukhārā (بخارى) is the Arabic form of the city’s local name, in use from the conquest of the early eighth century and carried through all of Arabic geographical and biographical literature; the most consequential bearer of its adjective is al-Bukhārī, compiler of the collection of hadith that Sunni Islam ranks second only to the Qur’an, whose name has put the city into Muslim mouths daily for eleven centuries. Yāqūt’s entry records the city’s learning and its unhealthy climate with equal fidelity. What the name means, Arabic could not say; the old derivation from Sanskrit vihāra, a Buddhist monastery, has yielded in modern scholarship to a probably Sogdian origin, with no reading established.

The entry’s payoff is the afterlife of the adjective. Bukhārī began as a plain toponymic surname, one scholar’s tag among the thousands in the biographical dictionaries; the authority of one book made it a holy word, so that the city’s name achieved its widest circulation detached from the city, as the title of a text recited from Senegal to Java by people who could not place Bukhara on a map. No other city on this atlas is known to more people through fewer facts. The msr family shows a country’s name narrowing to a city; Bukhārī shows a city’s name escaping geography altogether, into the running text of a civilization’s piety.

Bukhārā (بخارا) in Classical Persian is the name of the language’s own first capital. The Samanid court at Bukhara in the ninth and tenth centuries is where New Persian poetry began its recorded life, and the name is embedded in its founding monument: Rūdakī’s famous lines urging the amir home, “the Jū-yi Mūliyān’s scent comes to us; long live Bukhārā, be glad amid your friends, the amir is the moon and Bukhārā the sky,” are among the earliest celebrated verses in the language, and they are about the city itself. Persian usage carries the name unchanged to the present.

The entry marks a unique relationship on this atlas: not a language naming a city, but a city hosting a language’s rebirth and receiving its first great compliment in return. Persian literature’s opening canon includes Bukhara’s own praises, so the city is written into the tradition’s foundation the way Troy is written into Greek’s, except as home rather than ruin. There is an irony the entry should not hide: the court that midwifed Persian’s return was itself Turkic-ruled within a century, and Bukhara’s speech today is Tajik Persian in an Uzbek state, the language and the city still entangled a millennium after Rūdakī rhymed them. The first city Persian poetry ever praised is still answering to the same name, in the same language, against considerable odds.