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Settling down among the inhabitants, and intermarrying with them, in the course of generations their Tartar characteristics were sensibly softened. For a thousand years this restless people remained there, as if chained to the soil. They still had the staple of barbarism in them, but so polished were they for children of a Tartar stock, that they are called in history the White Huns of Sogdiana.
The vast body of existing hymns, of which many were by no means distinctly Mazdayashnian, were reduced to a limited number containing the best and purest; and the multifarious mass of conflicting caste practices, partly imported from India, and partly inherited by the pure Persians from the Aryan home in Sogdiana, was simplified and reduced to a plain rule.
In the following year he subdued the whole of Sogdiana, and married Roxana, whom he had taken prisoner. She was the daughter of Oxyartes, one of the enemy's captains, and was said to be the fairest of all the virgins of Asia.
It was far otherwise with their brethren in Sogdiana; they were there first as conquerors, then as conquered. First they held it in possession as their prize for 90 or 100 years; they came into the usufruct and enjoyment of it. Next, their political ascendancy over it involved, as in the case of the White Huns, some sort of moral surrender of themselves to it.
He looked towards the home of his youth, and the seat of his long prosperity, across the Oxus, to Sogdiana, to Samarcand, its splendid capital, with its rich groves and smiling pastures, and there the old man went to die.
Even after the ravages of that conqueror, however, Timour and the Emperor Baber, who had a right to judge of the comparative excellence of the countries of the East, bear witness to the beauty of Sogdiana. Timour, who had fixed his imperial seat in Samarcand, boasted he had a garden 120 miles in extent.
The Eastern are Hyrcania, Parthia, Aria, Chorasmia, Sogdiana, Bactria, Scythia, Gandaria, Sattagydia, India, Paricania, the Eastern AEthiopia, and Mycia. Of these countries a considerable number have been already described in these volumes.
At five o'clock in the morning the train stops at the capital of the Khanate of Bokhara, eleven hundred and seven versts from Uzun Ada. The Khanates of Bokhara and Samarkand used to form Sogdiana, a Persian satrapy inhabited by the Tadjiks and afterwards by the Usbegs, who invaded the country at the close of the fifteenth century.
The year 1048 of our era is fixed by chronologists as the date of the rise of the Turkish power, as far as Christendom is interested in its history. Sixty-three years before this date, a Turk of high rank, of the name of Seljuk, had quarrelled with his native prince in Turkistan, crossed the Jaxartes with his followers, and planted himself in the territory of Sogdiana.
As to Sogdiana, or Maver-ul-nere, the region with which we are specially concerned, the Orientals, especially the Persians, of the medieval period do not know how to express in fit terms their admiration of its climate and soil. They do not scruple to call it the Paradise of Asia.
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