St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies 69 Panel Four. The Languages of Afghanistan and the Liminal Areas... Pavel B. Lurje (The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia) The Area of the Bactrian Language in the Early Middle Ages as Seen from Toponymical Data The language called today Bactrian, was spoken on the territories called Bactria and later Tokharistan in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. According to the texts, which came to light, were deciphered and published mostly during the last 25 years, it was a Middle Iranian tongue attributed to eastern or central subgroup, related first of all to medieval Parthian and Sogdian and modern Pashto, Wanetsi, Munji and Yidgha. These texts cover the span of more than 600 years and document various stages of the language, shed much light on its history and internal structure, and show the history of Northern Afghanistan and Southern Central Asia from a completely new prospective. Most of these texts however were found accidentally, and we do not know the exact location of the find. Thus, it is interesting to understand which territory was occupied by the extinct Bactrian language. The main device here is the study of ancient toponymy. Fortunately, medieval sources of the pre-Mongol period, first of all Arabic and Persian geographical treatises, but also Chinese records, provide a large number of place-names of historical Bactria and neighbouring regions in a rather exact rendering and importantly clearly indicating their geographical locations. Many of these place-names are etymologically obvious and show peculiar features of the Bactrian language. The most evident shibboleth of Bactrian is its lambdaism , the change of Old Iranian *d into l , but other features such as the simplification of clusters, lenition of intervocalic consonants, peculiar suffixes are also visible. The analysis of these place-names clearly shows that Bactrian was spoken in the middle course of the Oxus, on the right-hand and left-hand tributaries of the great river. There, especially in larger cities, New Persian also was in use. The regions to the south of the Hindukush, to the south of Bamyan and Panjsher, were hardly included into the Bactrian-speaking milieu. The same is true for the Upper Panj river valley, for Herat region and for Ghur. On the northern side, the border between the Bactrian and the Sogdian languages lied in the Hissar range, and on the north-west, in Kerka. The archaeological data and historical sources seem to agree with these delimitations. In the frontier regions one finds the names which have various forms corresponding to the different languages spoken in the region. That is true for — Āmul (Bactrian) / Āmūya (Middle Persian) / *Āmuδ (Sogdian) on the MiddleAmu-Darya, and Naxšab (Sogdian) / Na ṣ af (Bactrian) in southern Sogdiana.