Sogdiana

The Avestan name of Sogdiana, Suγδa, in the opening chapter of the Vidēvdād, which catalogues the sixteen lands Ahura Mazda created for the Aryans. Gava-Suγδa, “the settlement of Sogdiana,” stands second on the list, after only Airyana Vaēǰah, the mythical Aryan homeland itself; Sogdiana is thus among the most ancient and most honored names in the Iranian sacred geography, set near the very source of the created world.

Suγδa is the deepest layer of the region’s name, older than the Achaemenid satrapy Suguda that descends from it and far older than the Greek and Arabic forms. That the land of Samarkand should rank second in the oldest Iranian scripture, immediately after the homeland of the Aryans, tells how central the Sogdian oases were to the early Iranian world. The name runs unbroken from the Avesta’s list of created lands through Darius’s tribute-rolls to the al-Ṣughd of the medieval geographers, one of the most stable region-names in this atlas.

The Old Persian name of Sogdiana, Suguda, listed among the satrapies of Darius at Behistun and Naqsh-e Rustam, the northeastern march of the empire between the Oxus and the Jaxartes. In the trilingual royal inscriptions the Elamite and Babylonian versions render the same name. Sogdiana, with Bactria, formed the far frontier of Achaemenid power, the staging-ground of Cyrus’s last campaigns and the scene of Alexander’s hardest fighting.

Suguda is the administrative form of a name far older than the empire that listed it. The Achaemenid chancellery recorded it as one satrapy among many, but the same name stands near the head of the Avestan list of the lands of the Aryans, the sacred geography of the Zoroastrian scripture; the satrapy and the holy land are one. The Greek Sogdianḗ and Arabic al-Ṣughd both descend through this Iranian Suguda, the land of Samarkand keeping one name from Darius’s rosters to the medieval geographers.

The Greek name of the region, Sogdianḗ, taken from the Old Persian Suguda; it enters Greek with Alexander, whose conquest of Sogdiana was the longest and bloodiest phase of his eastern campaign, a two-year war against the local barons among the rock-fortresses of the Zarafshan. Its capital Marakanda, Samarkand, became one of the famous cities of the Hellenistic East, and a Greek kingdom held the land for a century after Alexander.

Sogdianḗ is the Iranian satrapy-name in Greek dress, and through the Latin Sogdiana it became the region’s standard name in the Western tradition. The Greeks took the land at the moment it passed from Persian to Macedonian rule, and their form preserves the Achaemenid administrative name even as the empire that coined it fell. Behind the Greek lies the long Iranian history of the name, the Suguda of Darius and the Suγδa of the Avesta, a depth the Greek label, like most of Alexander’s borrowings, carried without registering.

The Latin name of the region, Sogdiana, taken from the Greek; Curtius gives the fullest classical narrative of Alexander’s grinding war there, and Pliny sets the land at the northeastern edge of the known world, beyond Bactria and the Oxus. To Rome it was a name of the remotest East, the country of the famous rock-citadels Alexander had stormed.

The Latin fixed Sogdiana in the Western learned tradition as the standard name of the land between the rivers. It is the last of the long line of forms, the Avestan Suγδa, the Achaemenid Suguda, the Greek Sogdianḗ, and stands at the western end of a name that had run, by then, for more than a thousand years. The Sogdian merchants who carried it east along the Silk Road would in time make their own name known from China to Persia, but in the West the land remained, fixed in Latin, the Sogdiana of Alexander’s hardest war.

The Middle Persian name of Sogdiana, Sūgd, the Old Persian Suguda of the Achaemenid satrapy lists contracted by a millennium of Persian speech to a single syllable. It is attested in the great trilingual inscription of Šābuhr I at the Kaʿba-ye Zardušt, c. 262 CE, where the king’s dominion runs “up to Kāš, Sūgd, and Čāčestān”: Sogdiana stands in the list not as a governed province with a resident administration but as the named limit of empire, the last country before the steppe. The spelling here is the Inscriptional Pahlavi rendering used for Middle Persian in this atlas.

The position in the sentence is the entry’s real content. Darius had listed Suguda as a possession; Šābuhr names Sūgd as a boundary, the point up to which power reaches rather than a place where it sits. Between the two inscriptions the name itself had worn from three syllables to one while its grammatical role wore from object to landmark, the word and the claim eroding together. Within the family the form is the Persian-side twin of what the Sogdians wrote for themselves as swγδ, recorded on this page from their own letters; the two spellings, converging from either end of the Iranian world, agree on the shape the name would carry into Arabic as al-Ṣughd.

swγδ is Sogdiana’s name in Sogdian, the land’s own word for itself at last: a consonantal skeleton, conventionally read Suγδ, spelled with the script’s γ and δ for the fricatives that Old Persian could only approximate. The form appears across the Sogdian corpus, in the Ancient Letters of c. 313 CE and in the Mugh documents of the early eighth century, where the ruler Dēwāštīč styles himself in Sogdian “king of Sogd”; the spelling varies between swγδ- and sγwδ-, always with the δ. The adjective swγδyk, “Sogdian,” names the language and the people from the same base.

Every other form on this page is an outsider’s: the Achaemenid trilingual’s Suguda, the Avestan land-list’s Suγδa, the Greek Sogdianē that Alexander’s historians made canonical. This entry is the word the Samarkand merchants themselves wrote in the addresses of their letters, and its fricatives are the test the exonyms are measured against; Old Persian -gd- is now read as an attempt at exactly the -γδ- this spelling preserves. The name that the whole family transmits is, on this page alone, written by the people who bore it.

The Chinese name of Sogdiana, 粟特 Sùtè, the standard form of the dynastic histories from the Weishu onward for the country of the oasis merchants who ran the caravan trade into China itself. The transcription renders the Iranian Suγδ that this page traces from the Avesta forward; an earlier and garbled form, 粟弋 Sùyì, already stands in the Hou Hanshu, showing the name had reached Chinese ears centuries before the classic spelling settled. Beside the country-name, Tang administrative practice knew the Sogdian city-states individually as the “nine families of Zhaowu,” the Ānguó and Kāngguó of this atlas’s Bukhara and Samarkand pages.

No other language on this page named Sogdiana from so intimate an acquaintance. The Persians taxed it, the Greeks garrisoned it, the Arabs conquered it; the Chinese lived with it, for the Sogdians were the merchants in every western market of Chang’an, and the name Sùtè denoted not a distant province but the homeland of neighbors. It is the suguda family’s furthest station and its most familiar: the country’s name carried east not by an army or a scripture but by the Sogdians themselves, who were their own best ambassadors and, for a few centuries, the connective tissue of Asia.

The Arabic name of Sogdiana, al-Ṣughd, the rich and famous valley of the Zarafshan around Samarkand and Bukhara, which the geographers of the Islamic East counted among the loveliest and most fertile lands of the world. After the Arab conquests it became one of the great provinces of Khurasan and Transoxiana, the heartland of the trade and learning of the medieval east.

al-Ṣughd is the last form in the long descent of the name, the Iranian Suγδa continued into Arabic. The region the Arabs knew as the garden of the east is the same the Avesta had ranked second among the lands of the Aryans, and the continuity of the name across that whole span, from Zoroastrian scripture through the Achaemenid satrapy and the Greek province to the Arabic geography, is nearly total. Few names in this atlas survive so completely across so many empires; the land of Samarkand answered to a single name, in a dozen scripts, for two thousand years.