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Sogdia and India

The Sogdians were a merchant people of the silk-road & were extensively settled in China. Like all Central Asians, they were influenced deeply by Indian Civilization not only in terms of language but also religion & iconography. For example, the Sogdians called the leaders of their merchant communities & caravans as s’rtp’w. This is a loanword from Sanskrit सार्थवाहन (leader of a caravan of merchants). This term would be loaned into Chinese as “sabao” & applied to leaders of the Sogdian community. Some other loanwords from Sanskrit and Prakrit that we see in Sogdian. A lot of these words are related to commerece (sārtha, sārthavāhana, mūlya) while others are related to bureaucratic necessities like (lekha, prastha). Some of the Sogdians were Hindus. For example, this is a famous wall painting of Lord Shiva from Panjikent (Tajikistan).

Contacts of the Sogdians with India played an essential role in the conduit of Buddhism to China. For example, Amoghavajra the great translator of tantra into Chinese was the son of a North Indian man from a merchant family and a Sogdian woman but born in Ceylon.+++(5)+++ The Sogdians may have been mentioned in the Purāṇas and the Mahābhārata with the name चूलिक / चूचुप. This identification remains open and plausible but not certain.