Migration West — Bactria, Persia, and the House of Waraz
3rd – 5th century CE · Bactria, Sogdiana, the Sassanian heartland
The migration west out of the Altai reached its first political culmination in Bactria — the basin between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus that the Greeks had called the “land of a thousand cities”. Iranian and Chinese sources begin to call the western Altai clans Hephthalites (Greek Hephthalitai; Pahlavi Hēvtāl; Armenian Hep’tal; Chinese Yetha, Heda, Ye-ta-i-lito). The earliest reliable text is the Sogdian merchant Nanaivande’s letter of 313 CE, recovered from a watchtower west of Dunhuang, which describes the destruction of Luoyang and the migration of “the Huns” through the corridor.
Bactria after the Kushans
The Hephthalites entered a Bactria already loosened by the slow collapse of Kushan authority and the Sassanian conquest of 234 CE under Ardashir I. The earlier Kushan emperors — Kujula Kadphises, Vima Takto, Vima Kadphises, and Kanishka the Great (c. 110–134 CE) — had built a syncretic empire in which Bactrian, Greek, and Indian motifs ran together on a single coin. Sassanian rule supplanted that mint tradition with the fire-altar reverse, and inserted a viceroy — the Kushanshah — over the old Kushan territory. By the early fifth century the Sassanian grip was failing; the Hephthalites stepped into that vacuum, first as Sassanian auxiliaries and then, after a series of decisive engagements, as the senior power on both sides of the Oxus. The Kidarite kingdom (under Kidara/Jiduolo and his successors), which had taken Gandhara in the 410s, was finally finished off by the Hephthalites in the 470s CE.
The Three Hephthalite Wars of Peroz
The defining conflict of the late fifth century was the long Sassanian war against the Hephthalites. Procopius, in De Bello Persico, describes three campaigns: the first ended in the capture and ransom of Sassanian crown prince Kawad, who lived as a hostage at the Hephthalite court before returning to take the throne; the second ended in stalemate; the third, in 484 CE, ended in disaster when the Hephthalite ruler — variously named in the sources as Axsunwar, V.R.Z., or Warāz — lured Peroz I and his army into a concealed trench and killed the Sassanian king on the field. The death of Peroz is the moment after which Hephthalite influence in Sassanian dynastic politics is absolute: Sassanian princes seek refuge at the Hephthalite court, marry into Hephthalite families, and adopt Hephthalite ceremonial.
The House of Waraz
The Hephthalite ruling clan is admitted into the Sassanian aristocracy as the House of Waraz — one of the seven great houses of the Sassanian empire (alongside Suren, Karen, Ispahbudhan, Spendiyad, Mihran, and Kanarang). Richard N. Frye, in The Heritage of Persia (1962) and The Golden Age of Persia (2003), identifies the boar (Pahlavi warāz; Old Persian varaz) as the totem of the house and as a theophoric element in personal names — Warazden, Warazdat, Waraz-Mihr, Mihr-Waraz, Waraz-Ohrmazd, Waraz-Bandeh. Royal inscriptions of Ardashir I (Déhén î Varz), Shahpur I (Ardashir I Varz), Vahram II, and Ohrmazd I Varah preserve the name from the third century onward. The Hudud al-Alam records that the rulers of Manshan are called Baraz Banda, the king of Gharchistan Braz Bandah, and the rulers of Herat, Bushanc, and Badghis collectively Barazan.
The boar god — Verethragna
The Mazdean god Verethragna — Avestan deity of victory, cognate with Sanskrit Vrtrahan (“slayer of Vritra”) and assimilated to Indra — takes the form of a boar in the Bahram Yasht. The motif is visible in Sassanian rock relief at Taq-i-Bustan (royal hunt) and in the Bamiyan paintings, where a great winged boar appears beside the 53-metre Buddha. A. D. H. Bivar, in his 2003 essay The Alkhan Huns and their Indian coins, identified the figure of Khingila in the same Bamiyan composition. From the Sassanian capital the boar travels to Hungary as the Pecheneg ruling clan Thonuzoba (Anonymus’s Gesta Hungarorum, c. 1200) and east to Gandhara, where it is consecrated as Vishnu’s third avatar at the Eran shrine of Toramana.
Toward the Hindu Kush
From Bactria, two political branches emerge. The senior, the Hephthalite-Waraz court at Balkh, holds the western steppe and the Sassanian frontier. The southern, the Alkhan, crosses the Hindu Kush in the second half of the fifth century and consolidates Gandhara, Kashmir, and the Punjab — the empire of Khingila, Toramana, and Mihirakula.
Continue to Hephthalites & Alkhans, or read on the death of Peroz at the trench.
In this era
- Peroz I — Sassanian king killed at the trench in 484 CE
- Kidara — Kidarite founder of the Gandhara kingdom
- Timeline 234 – 480 CE
- Primary sources — Procopius, the Sogdian Letters, Frye’s Heritage of Persia, Daryaee, Rezakhani
