"As soon as you hear any news you quickly send me a messenger"

[Bactrian language]. Letter addressed to Têtuk from the town of Sart.

€ 25.000,00

A Bactrian letter addressed to Têtuk of Sart, elsewhere given the title "Scribe of the Hephtalite Lords" and "Judge of Tokaristan and Gharchistan", with a complaint that the writer has not been kept abreast of events. The document reads, in full: "To Tetuk, many greetings from Sart Kharan the prince. When you went away from here, I ordered you thus: 'Whatever news you hear there, write to me'. And now you have sent a letter to the lord stating that the sotang had our [representative?] and abused him. This matter has not been decided at all ... So from now on you should act in such a way that as soon as you hear any news you quickly send me a messenger. To Tetuk, many greetings".

Until about three decades ago, the script of the Bactrian kingdom in southern Transoxania was known only from a few coins, seals and a handful of inscriptions. Around 1991, however, a cache of some 150 documents emerged from a single archive of the ruler of the city of Rob (modern Ruy, in the valleys north of Bamiyan), dating from the 4th to 8th century CE. Only once these documents had emerged could the Bactrian language and the strange script developed to commit it to writing (in fact adapted from Greek) be studied in sufficient detail to allow some understanding of it. They are first recorded on the European and American art market throughout the 1990s (the present example first appeared first in Sam Fogg's catalogue 16 from 1995); the vast majority of such documents were sold privately and were aggressively collected by Dr. David Naser Khalili for his Nour Foundation, with two further examples in the Schøyen collection, London and Oslo (their MSS 4580 and 4581; the former catalogued and reproduced on their website).

Such documents are of great importance for the history of a crucial region of the early world: a great empire stretching across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Northern India and significant parts of Central Asia. As the historian of Central Asia Nicholas Sims-Williams notes, "[d]uring the first centuries of the Christian era, Bactrian could legitimately have been ranked amongst the world's most important languages".

Bactria's inhabitants were originally a nomadic Kushanas people who seized control of southern Transoxania in the second century CE and adopted a Middle-Iranian language as an administrative tongue. In the middle of the fourth century, the rule of the Kushanas fell to the Hunnish tribe of the Chionites, and under the command of their leader Grumbates its armies fought alongside the Persians against the Romans at the siege of Amida in 360 CE. The Hepthalites moved in from the north and took control in the fifth century, and the named individuals in this document were certainly part of the ruling aristocracy serving these new overlords. While Islam arrived in Iran in 651 CE, it would not find a foothold in Bactria until the eighth century CE.