The Bactrian Documents vol I and II

The Bactrian Documents, translated by Nicholas Sims-Williams, are valuable, first hand documents written in the Bactrian language pertaining to everyday life in pre-Islamic Bactria.  The documents can vary from being as important as Buddhist texts or legal/marriage contracts to receipts for goods purchased and received from one person to another.  While the marriage contract is interesting to read, I honestly find the receipts to be very interesting and even slightly amusing to read.  It makes me chuckle to think of reading someone's old grocery shopping receipt from the Kushan era and finding that people back then shopped for things not so different than what we shop for today.  Such as in Document B:

"The year 137, the month Shabat,

There has been received by me, Aspal-bid, from you, Zuwanind, the store-keeper, what is written in the list:forty measures of flour and grain, twelve jars of wine, ten sieves, ten bags of straw, fourteen bundles of lucerne, one chicken.  So this (is) your proof (of receipt). " (1)

The contracts contained herein are also fascinating.  Document A is a marriage contract, wherein a woman named Ralik is married to brothers,  Bab and Piduk.  I'm not sure how common it was for one woman to be married to two men.  The reading here seems to be pretty clear on the matter, though:

"Now:There has been requested by me, Bag-farn, from you, Far-wesh, and from you, Nog-sanind, this woman whose name (is) Ralik (as) a fully privledged daughter-in-law, (as) a wife for these (my) sons, Bab and Piduk..." (2)

The document also goes on to say:

"And a declaration was made (by us), Bab and Piduk.  We have received Ralik - I, Bab, and (I), Piduk - (as) a wife (to be treated) like a wife in every home which we now have and also which we may acquire in the future, (as) a lady possessing authority, as (is) the established custom in the land." 

I immediately drew correlations in this practice here to the practice mentioned in the Bible of how Jewish men would marry the wives of their dead brothers, and any children had in that relationship would belong to the dead brother.  Mongol men would marry their stepmothers if their father died, or marry their brother's wives in order to keep the women in the family and afford them social security and protection.  This appears to be similar to that in some regard, though I wonder if both these men engaged in intercourse with her.  At least they would know someone was fathering the children, though probably not which brother was successfully producing offspring with her.

Other documents included in the volumes include contracts for sales of items and slaves.  Loan contracts were also present, describing their interest rate, penalties, and items and/or amounts of money loaned.  There are also Buddhist texts and private correspondence, as well as a few legal proclamations.  The documents bring to life the workings of an advanced, organized society.  These types of primary sources are my favorite because they demonstrate that people, living in the years approximately from 200-400 A.D, were not so different from us at all, and desired and valued similar things to modern people.  They needed clear legal rulings for property inheritence, grievances, and criminal justice.  They utilized marriage contracts to negotiate rights for newly married women and their roles in their new households.  They shopped in markets for goods to feed their families. They wrote expressive, elegant letters to one another and they wrote beautiful hymns to the Buddha.  The Bactrian Documents are a significant and integral source of information for Bactrian scholarship and crucial to understanding the rich history of this important area.

 

 

A Quick Note on Issues in Translation

As I've been translating Ibn al-Faqih and his account of the Balkh and the Barmakids, my professor and I have always understood that Naw Bihar = New Vihara.  Vihara, of course, is the name for Buddhist temples.  In reading other translations of primary source material, however, I have noticed that other authors have translated or understood Naw Bihar to be a reference to Fire Temples aka Zoroastrian places of worship.  So far, I've been unable to understand why this happens, because as far as I can tell, there's a pretty clear difference between the translation of the name of Zoroastrian places of worship and Buddhist places of worship. Even more than that, Richard Bulliet, in his article "Naw Bahar and the Survival of Iranian Buddhism" suggests there may have been a particular strain of Iranian Buddhism, itself distinct and different from the Mahayana and Theravada schools of Buddhism.  There were many "Naw Biharas" located through Tocharistan into Iran (Iranian-speaking or Iranian-influenced places), with the name meaning "New Spring" in Persian.  Without further archaeological evidence, as Bulliet laments, there is no hard evidence for a distinctly Persian flavor of Buddhism.

On another related note to the issues of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism is the issue of the Barmakids.  Bulliet states rather plainly the notion has been dispelled in recent scholarship that the Barmakids were descended of Zoroastrian priestly origins, and rather have origins in the Buddhist priestly class, taking their name Barmak from the title of the leader of the monastery.  More than that, the Barmak probably had vast regional authority in Bactria and Tocharistan.   In my translation work of Ibn al-Faqih, I've come across a passage on a rather well-known incident, describing the indignation of the King of Kabul over the conversion of Barmak abu Barmak abu Khalid to Islam.  The king fired off a letter to the new Barmak, the son of the previous, though now-converted, Barmak, who went by the new name Abd Allah, describing his feelings over the matter, saying what amounted to "nothing good has ever come from Islam".  The leader of one Buddhist monastery in Balkh, even though highly important in its time, would not have attracted such attention of local rulers with a move like this unless his authority was more than just religious in nature.  Likely, he was a powerful temporal as well as spiritual authority, perhaps akin to a Pope or a Caliph? That is pure speculation on my part, though an educated guess, nevertheless.

Once again, I'll leave the matter of the Barmakids to another post.  For now, just remember that when looking at a translated text, what you're reading always passes through the lens of one or more translators, and their finished product may not always be a perfect mirror of the original text.