the ‘outside’ other 29
aff airs. “Regretfully”, he writes, “many Sogdians live among them [the
Turks]... they train and instruct the Turks”.^53 Another signifi cant fact
was that it was the Sogdians who, being very interested in settling the
problem with the silk trade,^54 headed the earliest missions of the Turks
to Byzantium. Such missions were aimed at gaining (with the help
of the powerful Turkic khagans) the role of agents and middlemen
in this trade between Sogdiana and China, on the one hand, and the
Byzantine Empire, on the other, i.e., between the greatest producers
and the most serious consumer of silk in the early medieval period.
However, it is important to recall that one of the most common ways
and mechanisms in becoming acquainted with the Other, and the con-
fl ict with the otherness in general, is the Great Silk Road itself, which
breaks all boundaries. Various goods as well as real and imaginary
(conventional, taken from the old books) notions of the Other were
distributed along this road.^55
Returning to the writing system and its role in overcoming the bar-
riers to acquaintance with the Other, the intensive development of
the runic writing in the seventh–ninth century provided Turks and
Uighurs with a powerful instrument for creating their own identity.
Th is process was helped by written rhetoric and the notions of own
and foreign left for the future generations. By making inscriptions on
stone they also tried to propose a sort of innovation, a kind of ‘domes-
tication’ of the foreignness of the Chinese—the words cut on the stone
could be read and, at the same time, seen and not only heard; this
way, remembering was easier and more eff ective (apart from the visual
eff ect of the stone stelae sticking up from the soil). Regretfully, the
surviving monuments are not numerous, but the available ones are
extremely important since they are products of the domestic environ-
ment and reveal in a far more genuine way the image of the Other.^56
(^53) Lieu 1992, 228. Also see, Golden 1992, 134.
(^54) Menander 1958, 221. Details see in, De La Vaissière 2002, 230–233.
(^55) Th ere are many works dealing with questions regarding the Great Silk Road.
For instance see, Lubo-Lesnichenko 1994; Baipakov 1998; Liu 1998. For the cliché-
notions and archaizing in Byzantium—as both mental and artistic practice—see, Bar-
tusis 1995, 271–278.
(^56) For the role of the state, as well as literacy and their mutual relation and depen-
dency in certain moments, see, Kyzlasov 1994, 208–235. Kyzlasov pays attention to
the fact that the Chinese, especially during the period of the Second Turkic khaganate,
had a defi nite impact upon the concept’s development regarding khagans’ stelae and
their inscriptions (Kyzlasov 1994, 227). For the role of memory as one of the most