バクトリア語文書中にみえるカダグスタンについて

Abstract

After the appearance of more than 150 Bactrian documents written in cursive script, it became known that there was a region called "Kadagstan(καδαγοβιδο)" in northern Afghanistan. In this article, I deal with the origin and the location of this region. Reading through the Bactrian documents, we notice that there are several documents concerning Kadagstan. In the first part of the article, I pick out these documents from the corpus and arrange them as Table 1 and Table 2. In the second part, I deal with the origin of Kadagstan. Considering the situation of the eastern part of the Sasanian Empire, the change of the month name in the Bactrian documents, and the appearance of the title "kadag-bid(καδαγοβιδο)", it might be plausible that the origin of Kadagstan was closely linked to the starting point of the direct control by the Sasanian Empire in 380 CE. Finally, I consider the location of Kadagstan. There are several possibilities for the location of Kadagstan, but I could not define a specific region. To solve the problem, I propose the possibility that what has been indicated by the toponym Kadagstan in the Bactrian documents varies in its extent and/or location across the ages, and the toponym eventually came to imply a symbolic meaning rather than the substantial one. It might be an explanation for the reason why the name of Kadagstan is not mentioned in Chinese sources and Islamic sources.