Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
With the troops under his own command he marched against the fortress called the Sogdian Rock, seated on an isolated hill, so precipitous as to be deemed inaccessible, and so well supplied with provisions as to defy a blockade. The summons to surrender was treated with derision by the commander, who inquired whether the Macedonians had wings?
The works were of the most artificial type, far removed from all natural feeling. Music, too, was never so assiduously cultivated as at this time. But the old Chinese music disappeared in the south as in the north, where dancing troupes and women musicians in the Sogdian commercial colonies of the province of Kansu established the music of western Turkestan.
Sogdian merchants who later played a great role in commercial contacts might have been active already from 350 or 400 B.C. on and might have been the transmitters of new ideas. But Tsou Yen also considered the form of the world, and was the first to put forward the theory that the world consists not of a single continent with China in the middle of it, but of nine continents.
This is incorrect, as she was but a link in the chain of influences that played upon the emperor. His mother was a Turkish shamaness, his father, a foreigner probably of Sogdian origin. An Lu-shan succeeded in gaining favour with the Li clique, which hoped to make use of him for its own ends.
The Indian, Sogdian, and Turkestani monks were readily allowed to settle by the alien rulers of China, who had no national prejudice against other aliens. The monks were educated men and brought some useful knowledge from abroad. Educated Chinese were scarcely to be found, for the gentry retired to their estates, which they protected as well as they could from their alien ruler.
Part at least of this Tibetan Canon has been translated into Mongol. Renderings of various books into Uigur, Sogdian, Kuchanese, "Nordarisch" and other languages of Central Asia have been discovered by recent explorers. It is probable that they are all derived from the Sanskrit Canon and do not represent any independent tradition.
In the vain capital of China, the Sogdian caravans were entertained as the suppliant embassies of tributary kingdoms, and if they returned in safety, the bold adventure was rewarded with exorbitant gain.
Thus it received in former days the silk of China, the musk of Thibet, and the furs of Siberia, and shipped them for the cities of the Roman Empire. To Samarcand, its metropolis, we owe the art of transforming linen into paper, which the Sogdian merchants are said to have gained from China, and thence diffused by means of their own manufacturers over the western world.
These cities were surrounded with a double wall; and the exterior fortification, of a larger circumference, enclosed the fields and gardens of the adjacent district. The mutual wants of India and Europe were supplied by the diligence of the Sogdian merchants; and the inestimable art of transforming linen into paper has been diffused from the manufacture of Samarcand over the western world.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking