#sogdian miscellanea

[yamayuandadu]

I have seen claims that at the Hinglaj Mata temple a spirit/deity worshiped under the name of "Bibi Nani", is supposedly a continuation of Sogdian/Bactrian Nana. I can't find any actual academic articles confirming this, just random blogspots that all plagiarize eachother, and keep repeating "Ishtar is Durga is Nana" even though we know Nana comes from Nanaya, not Ishtar directly, and afaik, there is no proven relation between Ishtar and Durga. Am I right for assuming this is just bullshit?

On De Gruyter, there are only two publications which mention Bibi Nani at all (other than 19th century reprints), both by the same author - a certain mr. David Gordon White who...... was an assistant of Mircea Eliade at some point according to his wiki page and incorporates Freudian themes into his scholarship. Off to a great start. Let's see what does he have to say under the cut.

The first book we need to look at is The Alchemical Body from 1993 (p. 205):

Well, that sure was illuminating. The use of "Chaldean" in a deeply puzzling context (nobody has ever proposed Nanaya originated as a Chaldean deity, and she predates first references to the Chaldean tribes appearing in Mesopotamia by centuries) coupled with the unawareness the Maccabees passage deals with the same deity would indicate complete unfamiliarity with Nanaya. Note that obviously Nanaya's and Anahita's names are not cognates of this title (let alone each other) judging from the etymology provided... Well, that and they're not "ancient mother goddesses" (I suppose calling the central Asian form of Nana[ya] an "early medieval civic goddess" lacks the mystique).

The only source White lists for this claim is not very promising, to put it very lightly - straight from the 1920s:

The only information here that does seem to check out is that "Bibi Nani" is a title used by Muslims. I can't find any estimates for how old the title is - it must've already been in use in the 19th century, and the Zikri community mentioned elsewhere in relation to the site dates back to the 1600s, but that doesn't help much. So far, no real case for identification with Nanaya to be made. Let's see the other passage, from Daemons Are Forever (p. 201). We are now in 2021, so perhaps mr. White had the opportunity to familiarize himself with at least some Nana(ya) publications.

Ah, nevermind. "Nana or Innana", lol, he didn't even romanize the latter name right. I haven't seen this supposed "generally accepted" idea in ANY publications about Nanaya - regardless of the discipline and language. The general consensus is that attestations of Nanaya go up to the tenth century, and that in the final centuries they are tied to Sogdians. Let's check the footnote.

He seems more sure of this than Falk himself (his article is here). Associating Nanaya with Venus is definitely a minority position though, regardless of the time period (Shenkar voiced a degree of support for Falk's proposal but that's about it, and I don't think this is taken by anyone but White as the source of the lion mount, also...). I wasn't familiar with the other paper listed here, but it's on academia edu. Unlike White, the author notes the identification of Bibi Nani as Nanaya is mostly the domain of publications from the 19th century. He also correctly highlights Nana(ya) is not Inanna (p. 42), and keeps stressing any association between her and the Hinglaj temple's history is purely speculative (pp. 43-44). While Brighhenti's methodology is MUCH more rigorous than White's, and the argument about a crescent-shaped natural rock formation is interesting, I'm personally not entirely convinced since Hinglaj is much further south than most central Asian attestations of Nana(ya); and she was popular chiefly in Sogdia, not in Bactria, especially after the Kushan period. Furthermore, Brighhenti relies on the incorrect assumption Nanaya was associated with earth and water (which is an extension of justifying her being more popular than Anahita or Armaiti by asserting they were interchangeable). He adds a claim from the 1960s that "her cult emphasized natural phenomena" - something I haven't seen anywhere else. Doesn't really seem to check out. The major cult centers of Nana(ya) through her entire history were significant because they were major cities or commercial hubs, not because of any natural phenomena, and neither in Mesopotamian nor Central Asian context I see much of a reason to suspect some deeper connection to nature. Whether in Mesopotamia, in Iran or in Central Asia, Nana(ya) was essentially a civic deity, from Uruk all the way to Panjakent. I don't know enough about the history of Hinglaj to tell if it fits that pattern. I will also note that Oxus and Mithra do appear in Bactrian sources postdating the arrival of Islam in the region but Nana does not, also; virtually all the attestations postdating the Kushans I'm aware of are from Sogdia, Khotan, Chorasmia and places where a significant number of Sogdians at least temporarily resided. Final verdict: not really seeing it but 90% of the Brighhenti paper is fine. I see no reason to challenge the consensus position that Nanaya's history ends roughly in the tenth century, considerably further north, though. I feel like if the evidence really was that strong Bibi Nani would pop up in more recent studies about the transfer of Nanaya's cult. As a side note, not even Brighenti suggests that the modern goddess of Hinglaj is Nana(ya). He proposes she was introduced from northern India in the 9th or 10th century, which lines up with historical sources he provides pretty well.

I did a quick survey of other sites and the only other Nanaya = Bibi Nani truther is Asko Parpola (who is, naturally, convinced she is ACTUALLY Inanna). I refuse to engage with the Parpolas, and Asko is supposedly even less rigorous than Simo. This is par the course for hyperdiffusionists. The final matter to address is the weird claim about Durga being Ishtar or. Whatever. I won't engage with this directly, the source is almost definitely wikipedia's questionable Inanna article which was pretty heavy on this sort of takes and probably still is - courtesy of the Parpolas. Now, the Hinglaj goddess is indeed identified with Durga apparently, but Durga as you correctly pointed outhas nothing to do with Ishtar, and even the connection to Nanaya is at best vague. Basically, it has been suggested that the iconographic type represented by Nanaya with lion on coins might have influenced early depictions of Durga from Mathura (or an unidentified deity iconographically similar to Durga; there's some discussion in Westenholz's article here, pp. 190-191; Potts brings it up in his 2001 Nanaya article too but this one has mixed reception and he assumes Nanaya's spouse in Central Asia was Oesho, not Tishtrya, which doesn't seem to be a widespread view). This doesn't seem too unlikely. However, even if we accept this, it would only constitute transfer of an iconographic type (so the connection between Nanaya and Durga would be about as close as between Nanaya and Dionysus). In a region where these moved in a basically kaleidoscopic manner at that, judging from the fabled case of Tishtrya as Artemis. Iconography can move separately from the actual deity (least we forget Taweret becoming a generic critter on Crete); and as far as I am aware, there is no evidence Nanaya herself was worshiped in Mathura.

[yamayuandadu]

There's something uniquely funny about a single passage having to specify this is NOT Christian Jesus but a different version of Jesus, and also listing him and Buddha alongside the star of Mesopotamian love incantations, who by some miracle survived for centuries far away from her original home.

[yamayuandadu]

regarding the sogdians and foxes. do you know if the sogdians themselves practiced a fox cult of some kind? also an unrelated question but i was wondering. was Taoism practiced westwards in the sogdian heartland?

I am not aware of that. I don't really think there was much in the way of animal cults in Sogdia in general. While many deities were associated with specifica animals and in fact in art some can only be identified by their animal attribute (a mount, a throne with animal decorations, or an accessory), foxes aren't among them. Comparative evidence from other contemporary or slightly more recent sources pertaining to other Iranian peoples doesn't really hint at anything similar to the Chinese fox cults either. In Zoroastrian tradition some favorable description can be found but this reflects the fact Avesta considers the fox a type of dog and by extension presents it as one of the animals created to counter malign influence (source), there's no fox yazata or anything of that sort. Al-Biruni might be describing depictions of the simurg as "flying foxes" (ﺧﺮﺳﺎنخﺮ, hurasan-xvarra) but that's an isolated example. The only information about Sogdian or at least Sogdian-adjacent perception of the matter of foxes in Cult of the Fox is that we at the very least know An Lushan and his contemporary Geshu Han were aware of the derogatory implications. Doubtlessly there were more foregners who had opinions on that since there's a fair share of evidence the fox comparisons were employed casually in everyday speech, but so far I failed to find any first hand accounts. Individual Chinese stories might portray foreigners as well versed in fox affairs - for example in Shen Jiji's Tale of Miss Ren a foreign food vendor living next to the eponymous character is well aware she is a fox and doesn't really seem to be bothered - but there are ultimately just literary fiction. I do think it would be interesting to wonder how the matter was seen by "naturalized citizens" so to speak - whether they saw a mirror of own struggles in fox tales, whether they took part in domestic fox cults in areas where they were prevalent etc. - but I don't think there's any material evidence which would make it possible to explore that.

As for the second question, I am not aware of Taoism spreading that far westwards. It also doesn't come up in any publications I read which deal with religions present in Sogdia - and most of these do highlight plurality. An indigenous set of beliefs (whether it can be considered a form of Zoroastrianism or merely something vaguely related remains a matter of debate), Buddhism, (Nestorian) Christianity and Manichaeism are all well attested. I read a few surveys of Sogdian theophoric names too, and no Taoist figures come up (while Buddha and Jesus are comparably well attested as local variants of Mithra and Nanaya). For the most part I'm only aware of Taoism spreading in some capacity to Vietnam, Korea and Japan in the first millennium - in other words, eastwards, not westwards. However, there is some evidence of Xuanzang being provided with Sanskrit translations of Taoist classics before embarking on his journey to India (see Daoism in the Tang (618-907) in the Brill Daoism Handbook), so it does seem fair to say attempts must have been made.

The possible attempts at westward transfer of Taoism were seemingly generally tied to interactions between this religion and Buddhism. This is highlighted in particular by the rise of a popular legend according to which Laozi was also the source of many other teachings because he was identical with the historical Buddha (or vice versa; see here for full context).

[yamayuandadu]

hi. ive seen some of your posts abt the central Asian goddess nana and i was wondering if you have any resources on other central asian gods especially resources on weshparkar/veshparkar? also hypothetically speaking who would be his mesopotamian counterpart? would it be enlil or hadad?

When it comes to Weshparkar specifically, I am surprised to report the Wikipedia article is actually solid, credible and largely up to date. Not very long but perfectly fine to fall back on, and the sources listed are perfectly fine. The most up to date treatment of him and his peers can be found in Michael Shenkar’s Intangible Spirits and Graven Images: The Iconography of Deities in the Pre-Islamic Iranian World. There aren’t many publications focused on him specifically, though in the 1990s a lot was written about his Kushan forerunner Oesho. Sadly I am unable to access most of the relevant articles. Some articles of general interest are in the bibliography section of the Nana article I finished recently. I'm currently working on a wiki article on Oxus (the god, not the river) too, but the bibliography overlaps substantially. As for the second question: as far as I can tell, Weshparkar has no Mesopotamian counterpart to speak of. Save for Nana, who was a direct adaptation of a Mesopotamian goddess, Bel (presumably Marduk) sparsely attested in Achaemenid texts from Bactria (same case as Nana), and  Tish(trya) who was identified with Nabu in the Achaemenid period it’s hard to point out to Central Asian deities who do, really. By the time Nana reached Bactria (let alone Sogdia), Mesopotamian theology was one step away from its deathbed, so there most likely were no god lists establishing equivalences between Mesopotamian and Central Asian deities the way earlier ones did with Hurrian or Ugaritic ones.

If we are to entertain a purely theoretical scenario where such a connection arose - Enlil does not make a particularly good match.

Equivalents of Enlil follow a clear pattern: Dagan in Mari and beyond, Kumarbi in Hurrian sources, El in Ugarit (all in the second millennium BCE; see here) and Humban in Elam (in the first millennium BCE; see Henkelman's Other Gods Who Are) do not have much in common beyond their position as a senior deity, a “father of the gods”. To be precise - this is clearly attested for three of them only, we do not actually know if that’s fully true for Humban because Elamite theological sources dealing with him are basically nonexistent, but it does seem he was a king of the gods, at least.

While Weshparkar evidently was an incredibly popular god, as exemplified by the relief from the tomb of Wirkak, to the best of my knowledge there is no firm proof of him actually being regarded as the head of the pantheon, as it is attested for deities like Mithra, Oxus and Nana. There’s a mural which might show him a subordinate to another deity, if anything (it's discussed in Shenkar's book, in Apam Napat's entry). His primary roles, those of a warlike wind god, do not really match Enlil, who was not exactly known for warlike disposition and whose epithets, as recently established, prove the old theory about his purported weather connections wrong (see here; Schwemer's weather gods article discusses this matter too).

As for (H)Adad: I would argue Tishtrya is the closest due to the well established rainmaking role… but as outlined above, he was theologically recognized as a counterpart of a very different Mesopotamian god.

Ultimately there wasn’t really a Weshparkar-like “wind god” in Mesopotamia. Personified winds were a thing but they are more apotropaic creatures than gods proper. On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge there was no multi-purpose weather god in the type of Mesopotamian Adad or Wer in ancient Central Asia.

[yamayuandadu]

Bactria and Sogdia probably provide the single weirdest example of interpretatio graeca in history, with Oxus, a god representing the eponymous river and locally regarded as the "king of the gods" and "lord of the world" in one case represented as.... Marsyas

[yamayuandadu]

So if the Weshparkar evolving into Erlang Shen hypothesis is bunk, that begs the question, are there any Sogdian, Bactrian or other Central Asian deities that either evolved into Chinese ones, or were at least recorded as being worshiped in China? Also, what's your opinion on the alternate hypothesis that it's actually Tishtrya that evolved into Erlang Shen?

I probably should've been more precise. I am cautious because I haven't actually seen many authors endorsing it - granted, I haven't seen many authors discuss Weshparkar in the first place. Sogdian deities are a niche subject, after all. I am not denying the existence of similarities between Erlang and foreign figures, I just think that neither case has strong enough evidence to assert that Erlang was a direct adaptation of any Sogdian deity. I would go with Weshparkar over Tishtrya though, since the iconography is more similar. Tishtrya is actually an archer if Avestan evidence is applicable, as usually assumed, and lacks a third eye. I also think it would be easier to evaluate the evidence if we had more insights into Sogdian, Bactrian etc. theology and mythology. We can be fairly sure they did have myths, but they were not passed down in written form (or at least, have yet to be discovered) so for now a lot boils down to subjective interpretations. Tishtrya and Weshparkar are certainly warlike heavenly deities like Erlang, but beyond that it's hard to speak of similarities simply due to lack of evidence. I will say that from my perspective at the very least trying to link Erlang with Weshparkar or Tishtrya is certainly less implausible that the attempts to derive Xi Wangmu from Nana which... someone did try to do in the 2000s. That's too ridiculous to even consider. As for Central Asian deities in China in general: at the very least, Weshparkar is definitely depicted in the tomb Wirkak (here, upper part) and Nana on the Miho funerary couch, in both cases with some borrowed typically Chinese iconography. These objects were made for Sogdians who lived in China, but the style is hardly identical with works from Sogdian sites, so I think it counts. Obviously there probably are many other deities depicted on both of them and on other similar artifacts, but these are the only ones I've seen identified with certainty. Multiple other Central Asian deities are attested in theophoric names of Central Asians (mostly Sogdians) traveling through or living in China, including Mithra, Mah (the moon) and Rām (an elusive non-Zoroastrian but still Iranian deity). Chinese sources also allude to Taxsīč (I copy pasted the name, I haven't seen any romanization with less diacritics), Zun (Xuanzang encountered his worshipers) and possibly Oxus (in the form of a horse statue). Doubtlessly at least some of the deities Central Asians brought to China were incorporated into local pantheons or identified with other figures (we do know Weshparkar was incorporated into Buddhist beliefs in some capacity, apparently, but I do not know if that happened in China specifically) but I sadly have no specifics to offer. Chinese sources are pretty vague when it comes to describing western deities according to Shenkar's monograph which does not help.

[yamayuandadu]

learned in the process of the Nana(ya) article expansion that there's a pretty huge mistake on the MET's website: a Kushan statue of a goddess with cornucopia is labeled as Nana, but virtually every recent source I was able to consult seems to agree the only goddess depicted with this attribute in Kushan art was Ardoksho, who is demonstrably distinct from Nana I assume the mistake is based on the presence of a lion, but while lions were Nana's symbolic animals in central Asia, the exclusive connection between her and these animals is a Sogdian development, and this cannot yet be applied to Kushan art, which is earlier.

[yamayuandadu]

quick update/correction to the previous post: Weshparkar appears in Buddhist context in the Sogdian translation of Vessantara Jataka, where he replaces Shiva. It's briefly discussed here. Check out Zurvan (sic) as stand-in for Brahma, too. Brahma has to have the most unexpected set of associated foreign deities, between this in Sogdia and Toyouke and Amaterasu (sic) in Japan.