Local Dominant Classes in Tukhāristān Viewed from the Bactrian Documents

Abstract

Due to new information from the Bactrian documents deciphered and published by Nicholas Sims-Williams, we can now research new subjects that have not previously been studied on the history, geography, and society of Tukhāristān in the pre-Islamic period. In this article, I perform a historical study on the local dominant classes in Tukhāristān by using the fruits of philological study on these Bactrian documents.

The local ruler in Tukhāristān is referred to as khar in the Bactrian documents. In the first chapter, I scrutinized all documents in which khar is mentioned and showed the following possibilities: there were a number of khars in Tukhāristān from region to region and their regional control changed with the times; apart from khar, there was shaho ‘king’ in this region and shaho was gradually replaced by khar; the khar’s jurisdiction corresponded with the largest administrative division, which is referred to as shahro ‘city’ in the documents.

Kharagan, a word derived from khar is frequently mentioned in the documents, which is considered as an epithet for indicating belonging to a family of khar. In the second chapter, I examined local aristocratic classes who bore this epithet and highlighted the following: kharagan would have had private property and would have controlled an administrative division called a lizo ‘citadel’; this characteristic is comparable to a landed class, which is called dehqān in Islamic sources; regarding labirobido, a title meaning ‘chief scribe’ born by a kharagan, one can compare this with an example in a Sogdian document, and this government post would have been of high degree.