Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan as a Historical Source for Early Medieval Turan (4th–8th Centuries CE)

Abstract

This article re-examines the corpus of Bactrian-language documents discovered in Northern Afghanistan and held principally in the Khalili Collection in London, in order to evaluate their evidentiary value for the history of Turan between the fourth and the eighth centuries CE. The study addresses three interlocking problems: (i) the historiographical convention in some national traditions of treating the entire corpus as a single "Rabatak archive" and confining it to the Kushan period; (ii) the unresolved chronology of the Bactrian era used in the deeds; and (iii) the under-utilised testimony of the documents for the socio-economic, legal and ethnopolitical history of the region under the Kushano-Sasanians, Chionites, Kidarites, Hephthalites (Abdal), Türk Khaganate and the early Arab Caliphate. The methodology combines source criticism, comparative philology and quantitative tabulation of diplomatic features. The analysis demonstrates that the documents constitute an internally diverse but functionally coherent body of legal-administrative records produced under a mature contractual regime, with standard formulas, witnessing, sealed double copies and codified penalty clauses. The recurring presence of the Turkic titles khagan, yabghu, tarkhan, tudun and iltäbär, and of the self-designation Abdalo, supplies direct, primary evidence that Turkic-speaking polities were not external conquerors superimposed upon a foreign society but constitutive components of early medieval Turanian statehood.