Wall Paintings – Tulips and Poppies from Ancient Panjakent
How a sheep helped discover priceless Panjakent artifacts
In the spring of 1932, a sheep nearby the Zeravshan River accidently fell into a pit. While trying to help it out, a shepherd named Jurali from the village of Hyderabad (presently in the Ayni district) found in the pit a half-rotted basket of willow rods with fragments of documents in an incomprehensible language.
The shepherd brought a find to the local mullah, the most knowledgeable person in the community, but the clergyman could not determine the exact origin of the text. The local authorities decided to send a photo of the manuscript to Leningrad, Russia, for closer examination.
There, the manuscript was identified as Sogdian text, from the ancient Central Asian region of Sogdiana. It was the first Sogdian document found on the territory of modern Tajikistan.
A small garrison fortress was once located on the site where the shepherd found the basket. This fortress was known as the castle on the Mount of Mugh, which belonged to Zoroastrian priests.
In autumn of 1933, Leningrad-based Persian scholar Alexander Freiman organized an expedition to Tajikistan, which unearthed a large archive of documents: 74 in the Sogdian language, one in Arabic, one in Old Turkic, and several in Chinese.
The find allowed historians to establish that at the beginning of the eighth century, the castle was the last refuge of Devashtich, the ruler of Panjakent, who hid there from the Arab conquerors.
Because of the special soil in this mountain gorge, the documents written on leather, parchment, and Chinese paper have been perfectly preserved in the ground for 13 centuries.
The discovery on the Mount of Mugh and the mention of the name of Panjakent ruler Devashtich prompted Soviet archeologists to start excavation work at the ancient Panjakent settlement. The first expeditions worked at the site from 1934 to 1937 but did not produce significant results.
Work was interrupted by the Second World War, and only in 1946, a major joint archaeological expedition was organized with specialists from the History of Material Culture Institute under the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Tajik branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and the State Hermitage. Two years later, archeologists found wall paintings in one of the ruined buildings of Ancient Panjakent under a thick layer of swampy ground.
For more than seventy years, the staff of the Tajik Academy of Sciences and the State Hermitage annually conduct excavations in ancient Panjakent. No other archaeological site in Central Asia has been studied so long and so thoroughly. The joint archeological work has given the world wonderful masterpieces of Sogdian art: wall paintings and carved wooden decorations, the best of which are now kept in the Hermitage and in the museums of Panjakent and Dushanbe.
A small town which developed through trade
Ancient Panjakent was a relatively young city compared to the other towns and settlements of Central Asia. It was built in the fifth century A.D. and existed until the middle of eighth century. In the early Middle Ages, there were fields and gardens stretching all the way to the banks of Zeravshan river, which modern Panjakent is now located.
During these times, Panjakent was a small provincial town. Five to ten thousand people lived behind the fortress walls of the medieval Shahristan (the 13-hectare part of the city inside the city walls but outside the citadel). These people were known as Sogdians – of Iranian origin, who in ancient times lived on the fertile ground between the Amu Darya (Vakhsho in Sogdian) and Syr Darya (Khshart) rivers, as well as in the Zeravshan (Namik) and Kashkadarya river valleys.
Beginning in the fifth century, the Panjakent residents, a fairly provincial people compared to their neighbors, experienced a rapid surge in economic and cultural development.
Their favorable location on the Great Silk Road allowed Sogdian merchants to take control of all trade routes between Byzantium and China. Trade became their main craft and the source of their wealth, lifestyle, and world outlook.
They traded with India and Russia, exchanging fur for silverware. They sold fabrics, paper, and luxury goods to other countries and peoples. And when the demand for silk had increased significantly, they began manufacturing their own varieties, such as “zandanechi” – a fabric characterized by rich ornaments that became popular in the West.
The Sogdians managed to steal several silkworm cocoons from China, but failed to discover the secret to creating long threads, which allowed the Chinese silk to be very light. Sogdian silk was woven from short threads; it was high quality, but rough and heavy, and looked more like brocade.
Panjakent houses – outside and inside
The main building materials in Central Asia were raw bricks and pakhsa (compacted clay). Until the modern era, it was the most popular and cheapest building material in the region. Stones for building could be only found in the mountains, and wood was in short supply, as trees grew only near the two city temples. All other vegetation and orchards were located outside the city walls.
In Panjakent, everything was built of clay bricks; the city was like a jungle of earthen huts where you could only escape from the summer heat behind the thick walls of a house.
However, Sogdian aristocracy and rich citizens, wishing to exhibit their wealth and sophistication, spared no expense for the interior decoration of their reception rooms and halls.
Imagine for a moment that you found yourself at the beginning of the eighth century in Panjakent and have been invited to the house of a rich Sogdian merchant.
You step into a small entrance hall. The servants pour water on your hands and help you take off your shoes. You look at the richly painted wall, which separates you from the large guest hall.
What do you see on the wall? Gods, kings, ancestors, the master on horseback depicted in rich clothes while hunting? A joyful feast with friends and an exuberant effusion of wine? Or maybe it is a story from fables and fairy tales?
Then you go to the hall, where you are welcomed by the master of the household. He sits in front of you in the place of honor, and invites you to sit down with other important guests. You climb the sufa (clay platform for rest), and from this height you can clearly see the whole room.
The walls are skillfully painted with a dizzying array of red, black, blue, and yellow. On them, you can see portraits of the owner surrounded by his merchant friends as they drink wine from cups and rhytons (a conical container for drink, often shaped like an animal’s head). They are wearing rich clothes made of Tang silk—every detail is thoroughly painted and you can see gold belts and richly inlaid dagger scabbards.
The image of the houseowner is itself designed to be idealistic rather than realistic. . In order to conform to the normal standards of beauty and to flatter the customer, most artists took considerable liberties in their paintings.
The color blue prevails in the paintings. Apparently, the owner wanted to show off his wealth, because natural blue is a precious color of paint, obtained from lapis lazuli. In a different region, this is the equivalent of applying gold leaf to the walls of your living room.
Surprisingly, no Sogdian paintings in Panjakent, Samarkand, or in Varakhsh feature the color green. Sogdian artists intentionally avoided this color, the reason for which remains a mystery to this day. However, in very rare cases, they mixed the colors yellow and blue.
A Hall of Blue
The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg stores one of the best wall paintings from Panjakent, the so-called Blue Hall painting. It dates back to 740 A.D. and is lucky to have been preserved from that era. The Arabs captured Panjakent early in the 8th century, burning and looting half of the city in the process.
The new religious order in Panjakent opposed any image of a human being, and the conquering Arabs rubbed the faces off many of the paintings. Everything that survived was destroyed by fire and water.
After the fire, it took another 10 years for life to recover in Panjakent, but the residents did not restore what was destroyed. In the second half of the eighth century, people began leaving the city. Left without caretakers, the clay town fell into decline and was forgotten for 1,300 years.
The fortunately well-preserved painting from the Blue Hall is based on the life story of Rustam, a Systanic knight and epic hero of the Iranian people. The ancient poet Firdausi immortalized this noble knight in his epic literary work “Shahname” (The Book of Kings). The painting is probably the last of the Sogdian art works from the final period of Ancient Panjakent’s.
Tulips and poppies from the lower palace of Panjakent’s ruler
In 1988, Panjakent municipal authorities began to level the ground near the Kainar spring, close to the old citadel of Panjakent. The bulldozer exposed layers of ancient construction, and work was immediately stopped to allow scientists to begin excavation.
The excavations were carried out in 1989 and 1992; following which, a bloody civil war broke out in Tajikistan and science became a rather low priority. During that time, the territory of Ancient Panjakent was overgrown with grass and turned into a meadow, where locals grazed their cattle and set up an ad-hoc landfill. The excavations resumed only in 2009.
During this second phase of archeological work, paintings with floral motifs were found in a small room at the lower palace of Panjakent’s ruler. Painted on a white wall, these images included tulips and poppies.
Each flower sketch is painted on a white background with bright petals and black contours. In the later sketches, the leaves and stems are black, but in earlier paintings gray-brown predominates (the artists did not use the color green in accordance with the customs of the time). Each flower is unique, suggesting that they were all drawn by hand and not by stencil.
The painting with poppies and tulips is probably one of the earliest works; it is relatively simple and inelaborate. The artist used kaolin (a type of clay) as the white base, and he likely either mixed it with vegetable glue or simply primed the wall with white plaster.
Black paint was obtained from charred bones or soot. The yellow – from auripigment, a mineral based on sulfur and arsenic. The red color and all its shades from light pink to purple-violet were obtained from the iron-rich soil mined in the mountains. If you pass through the Ayni district and the Zeravshan river valley, you can see these red hills and rocks in some locations.
The uniqueness of this finding is that three layers of paintings were discovered on the walls (on one of the eastern walls, there were even four layers). With a thickness of one to five millimeters, this is the first multilayer painting ever discovered.
How the multilayer Panjakent paintings were restored
Restoring the paintings was time-consuming field work and took place during four summers. It was possible to preserve all layers of the painting only by removing the layers one at a time.
First, the painting was cleaned and reinforced with a special adhesive. Next, it was sketched on a polyethylene film and again painted in several coats of the same adhesive to create a protective layer on the painting surface.
Then, the restorers carefully cut through the edges of the fragment to be removed; they glued gauze on it, grabbed a colorful layer near the wall with large thin knives, and finally removed it from the wall like an old skin. They did it with each of the layers—in total, removing 40 square meters of painting.
The two earlier layers depict the same floral motif – yellow tulips and poppies with inscriptions between them. While the compositions of the two images are similar, the paintings were created by very different manners.
The painting drawn on white gypsum soil is a grid drawn in wide black stripes, forming squares. The tulips, located in squares of two and three, are laid out like a chess board. At the bottom of the wall, parallel to the floor, is an ornamental frieze that looks like a harmonica. These two layers are called “early tulips” and “late tulips”.
On a layer of “late tulips”, the preliminary sketch of the drawing has been preserved; artist mistakes and some corrections are visible. Here we can trace the sequence of the painting; historians also speculate that more than one artist worked on the painting of this layer.
The third pictorial layer is even more simple than the layers with tulips. The main part of the wall space was left unpainted and only whitewashed. At the bottom of the wall parallel to the floor is an ornament “harmonica”.
The room seems to have gradually lost its meaning and the new design is much simpler. Barely discernible drawings scratched or painted with red paint by an amateur artist can also be seen on this layer.
It is impossible to say with certainty why the customer asked to paint the room with poppies and tulips. Compared to the paintings of a later period, this work looks quite simple and even primitive. One possible explanation is that the customer wanted a work to admire on cold winter evenings while waiting for the next spring. Today, the painting of tulips and poppies can be seen in the Museum of Antiquities of Tajikistan.
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Interestingly, the Sogdian capital city of Samarkand, located 60 kilometers west of Panjakent, was much larger and more crowded. However, it was in Panjakent, located between the capital and the mountainous region of Sogdiana, where amazingly beautiful samples of wall paintings were found. It is thanks to them we can learn about how the Sogdianis lived, what they believed in, what they ate, how they dressed, and how they played.
By the middle of the eighth century, residents left a city destroyed by the fire and Arab conquerors and settled nearby, on the lower terrace. At this point, many converted to Islam and lost their Sogdian identity, later to be called the “ancesters of the Tajiks”. Gradually, they lost their language and begin to speak a dialect of Iranian/Persian.
And a hundred years later, not far from Panjakent, a boy will be born with the Arabic name of Jafar, which means “brook”. He will be destined to raise the Tajik-Persian culture to unprecedented heights. This famous poet and literary genius was called Abu Abdullo Rudaki. But that is a story for a different day.
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In 2011, a project to preserve the 8th Century frescos with tulips and poppies from the Lower Palace of Ancient Panjakent was implemented by the U.S. Embassy to Tajikistan under the Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation. Found in 1897 under an ancient citadel, the frescos were subject to damage by water leaking from nearby irrigation systems. At a cost of $38,000, the project restored the frescos and installed them in the National Museum for visitors to view.
List of references
- M.B. Gervais, Restoration of the VI century multilayer painting “Tulips” from the lower palace in Panjakent. Materials of Panjakent archaeological expedition. Issue XX. State Hermitage Museum Publishing House. St. Petersburg, 2016
- Paintings of Ancient Panjakent, Publishing House of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1954
- Sculptures and paintings of Ancient Panjakent, the Soviet Academy of Sciences Publishing House, Moscow, 1959
- Marshak B.I., Raspopova V.I., Shkoda V.G., New Studies of Sogdian Culture in Panjakent. Archaeological bulletins, #2
- Panjakent’s winter gardens. Source: https://www.patreon.com/posts/panjakents-27648018
- I. Arzhantseva, Wonderworkers. Source: https://nat-geo.ru/planet/torgovtsy-chudesami/
- Sogd in the VI-VII centuries – the castle of Mugh and Panjakent. Source: https://www.tajik-gateway.org/wp/history/sogd-v-vi-vii-vv-zamok-mug-i-pendzhikent/
- Kalai Mugh. Wikipedia, Source: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B8-%D0%BC%D1%83%D0%B3