The “Red Hall” murals in the Varakhsha Palace (Bukhara Oasis)

Among the first amazing examples of Sogdian wall painting to come to the notice of the international scholarship, the murals of the Red Hall, in the palace of Varakhsha—a fortified town on the North-western fringes of the Bukhara oasis (Uzbekistan), excavated by Vassilij A. Šiškin in the years 1937-1938 and 1949-1954 —are still an unsolved riddle. Decades of diggings inSogdia, Ustrushana, Tokharestan and Chorasmia have yielded an impressive number of wall paintings, yet nowhere do we find evidence of a composition comparable to the one displayed in Varakhsha’s Red Hall. This article aims at broadening, or re-orienting, the scope of the analysis.