erroneously taken as the title Tarkhān, though it is in reality only the Arabic transcription of a personal name spelt in the Chinese records Tu-hoen. During the six or seven hundred years of their rule all these princes had become fully identified with their Iranian subjects[10]. The “kingship” moreover was not a real monarchy but rather the primacy in an oligarchical system. Their authority was far from absolute, and the landed aristocracy (dihqāns) and rich merchants possessed, as will be seen later, not only a large measure of independence but also on occasion the power to depose the ruling prince and elect his successor. As the succession appears to have been largely hereditary it is probable that, according to Iranian custom, eligibility was confined to a single royal house. In some cases, it would seem, the succession was regulated during the lifetime of the reigning prince by some such method as association in the principate, probably combined with the appointment of the remaining princes to other fiefs[11]. The “confederacy” of these states, however, was in no sense an alliance and probably amounted to little more than a _modus vivendi_. Besides the more important princes there existed an enormous number of petty autocrats, some possibly Turkish, others probably descended from former conquerors, whose authority may sometimes have scarcely extended beyond the limits of their own villages. In lands subject to the Turks and patrolled by nomadic tribes an effective centralised government was hardly possible. Mutual antagonisms and wars cannot have been uncommon though we have now no record of them, except that during the early Arab period there was hostility between Bukhārā and Wardāna, but the latter cannot be reckoned among the Shao-wu principalities since, according to Narshakhī, it was founded by a Sāsānid prince about 300 A.D. Until the profitable Chinese trade was threatened by the Arabs we find no trustworthy record of combined resistance offered by the country to its piecemeal reduction, and only long after the conquests of Qutayba is there any hint of a concerted rising. At the same time, the strength of the cities and warlike nature of their inhabitants may be gauged from the way in which they not only preserved themselves from destruction at the hands of their successive nomad invaders, but even gained their respect, while this, in some respects perhaps the most highly civilised of all the lands subdued by the Arabs[12], proved also the most difficult to conquer, and most intractable to hold.