 shapes of which recall nomadic types.Sogdian textiles (decorative art) are known to have been in great demand among their neighbours. Sāsānian motifs must have reached Sogdian weavers by way of imports from Persia, indirectly routed through Parthia, and also from Zoroastrians seeking protection in Sogdiana from Persian persecution. These motifs often figure both on surviving textiles and on those recorded in the paintings. The murals at Varakhsha, for example, include motifs taken from textiles, and a 5th-century mural from Balalyk Tepe displays the head of a tusked, boarlike animal set in a roundel that is almost identical to that on a Sāsānian fabric found at Astana in eastern Turkistan.Between the 5th and 7th centuries, the Sogdians made dried-brick caskets shaped like rectangular rooms to contain ossuaries, or urns for the bones of the dead. The sides and lids of the ossuaries were decorated. The ornamentation on an ossuary from Bia Naiman (State Hermitage Museum) has so many points in common with the decorations on a series of silver vessels that were, until recently, assigned to Bactria that the latter have come to be accepted as Sogdian. Several ewers have niches containing nude women rendered in a markedly Indian style, thereby recalling many a carved ivory plaque from Bagrām. Very similar niches adorn the Bia Naiman ossuary, but these contain crowned figures. In both cases the niches owe their form to Western influence, but those on the ossuary are formed of columns surmounted by capitals upholding pearl-studded arches, while on the ewers the Central Asian rosette replaces the capitals and the pearls.Sculpture, both in relief and in the round, was widely produced in Sogdiana. Much of the earlier work takes the form of panels or friezes made of alabaster, stucco, and wood. Rosettes, roundels, disks, and vegetation provide the chief motifs. Audience chambers and large reception rooms often contained statues in the round. Even the statues attached to the wall had the appearance of being worked in the round. The earliest wooden caryatids (caryatid), or columns in human form, are found at Pendzhikent. The caryatids in the form of women have their hair elaborately dressed, and, although nude at the waist, they wear boleros, as well as close-fitting, heavily trimmed skirts and splendid necklaces of Indian appearance. Once again, these figures recall those on Bagrām's ivory plaques and Buddhist statuettes of the 1st to 5th centuries.Fergana produced much pottery of quality, but, as yet, there have been no finds of comparable importance to those in Sogdiana. Its arts appear to have paralleled the developments in the more prosperous, more heavily populated, and more highly urbanized state of Chorasmia (later Khwārezm). Chorasmia's defensive architecture was particularly notable. Its great citadels and palaces (palace) were enclosed by two lines of walls strengthened by massive towers that were fitted with lookout posts and firing slits and topped by archers' galleries. Chorasmian entrance gates were labyrinthine in plan. Many of these splendid buildings have disappeared beneath the desert's encroaching sands. Toprak kala, recently excavated, near Tashauz, is thought to have served not only as a citadel but perhaps as Chorasmia's capital until about the 7th century. Defended by stout walls, the palace of sun-dried bricks was equipped with three lookout towers. The ground floor of this two-storied building acted as a foundation for the living rooms and storerooms above. Many of the rooms were adorned with sculpture: its most impressive room, the Hall of Kings, had niches fitted with grills ranged along the tops of its walls to hold statues of Chorasmia's rulers and notables; the Alabaster Hall contained many sculptures executed both in the round and in relief; a Hall of Victories contained statues of kings seated in the presence of a goddess of victory; statues of warriors carrying shields adorned the Warriors' Hall. All of the Chorasmian (Khwārezm) figural works are so lifelike that it is evident that portraiture had reac