일본의 소그드 연구 동향 －주요연구와 일본 미호뮤지엄 소장 석관상위병 검토－

Abstract

Full-scale sogd research in Japan began more than 100 years ago. Oriental historians who first showed interest in Sogd showed a high interest in Sogdiana's history and the Sogdians’ entry into China. In 1999, as the sogdians’ graves, including the Yu Hong’s Tomb(虞弘墓), were successively excavated in Tàiyuán of the Shānxī Province, it was revealed that the Stone Sarcophagus, housed in the Japanese Miho Museum, was also deeply related to sogd. As a result, it was reaffirmed that in China, the sogdians played not only an important role in trade, but also in areas of politics, diplomacy and religion. In this paper, I reviewed the trends and major studies related to sogd-related research in Japan, including prior studies of the figures M24 and 25 of the murals of Afrasiab. The figures were deemed to be ambassadors of the Korean peninsula. In addition, through examination of the F stone wall of the Stone Sarcophagus in the Miho Museum of Japan, it was confirmed that the F stone wall expressed the funeral rituals of the sogdians who worshiped Zoroastrianism. Therefore, the slabs of the Miho Museum are academically significant because they convey the Zoroastrian funeral culture of the sogdians. In addition, because the funeral scenes found on the F stone wall and those of the Sogd local Panjikend murals have a strong resemblance, the possibilitythat the Stone Sarcophagus of the Miho Museum also belongs to a sogdian tomb becomes more evident. In recent years, research and interest in sogd have also increased in Korean academia, but the research achievements of Japanese academia have not always been sufficiently reviewed in Korea. Overall, I hope that the major Japanese research and collections reviewed in this paper will be able to provide missing data to researchers and lead to new sogd studies.