01OVERVIEW
Front Matter
SCRIPT · PROFILE
Sogdian
The lingua franca script of Silk Road trade (4th century BC–10th century AD).
The lingua franca script of Silk Road trade (4th century BC–10th century AD). Sogdian merchants built trade networks across Central Asia, developing this script into an international commercial language. There was a Sogdian residential district in Tang dynasty Chang'an (Xi'an), and Sogdian language documents are among the Silk Road artifacts preserved in Japan's Shōsōin repository in Nara. Sogdian script is the key link in Eurasia's longest script lineage: Sogdian → Uyghur → Mongolian → Manchu. Sogdian merchants carried not only goods but religions — Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Nestorian Christianity coexisted within a single people. Tang-dynasty Changan had a Hu (Sogdian) quarter, and several Chinese words (Hu sock, Hu cake, Hu horn, Hu spinning dance) trace back to the Sogdians. The Umayyad capture of Samarkand in 712 and Genghis Khan invasion in 1220 erased Sogdian from history, yet their script survived through Uyghur, Mongolian, and Manchu — alive to this day.
04SPECIMEN
The Letters
Signs · Unicode · TypesSample GlyphsClick to copy
Glyph evolution
Form change over time
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05DECIPHERMENT
The Decipherment
Discovered 1907 · deciphered from 1931 onwardKey scholars
The Sogdian Ancient Letters — five letters
Wang Yuanlu (Daoist priest)1849–1931
A Daoist priest cleaning the Mogao Caves. In 1900 he broke through a sealed wall in Cave 17 (the "Library Cave"), uncovering tens of thousands of manuscripts that had been sealed for nearly a millennium. He did not at first realize their value.
Aurel Stein1862–1943
Discovered the five letters in a ruined watchtower west of Dunhuang in 1907. That same year he removed ~7,000 scrolls from Mogao Cave 17 to Britain — one bundle of which contained a script no one had ever seen.
Paul Pelliot1878–1945
French sinologist. Arrived at Dunhuang in 1908; fluent in Classical Chinese, he selected the scholarly most valuable scrolls and brought them to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. One of the Sogdian Ancient Letters is held in Paris today, the other four in London.
Hans Reichelt1877–1939
Published the first edition and translation of the Ancient Letters in 1931.
W. B. Henning1908–1967
Dated the letters to 313–314 AD from their reference to the fall of Luoyang.
Nicholas Sims-Williams1949–
Produced the modern standard editions and established Sogdian grammar and lexicon.
Before
Sogdian had been forgotten for some 1,500 years. Once the lingua franca of Silk Road trade, it became unreadable after the Sogdians vanished from history.
Breakthrough
In 1907 Aurel Stein found five sealed letters in a ruined watchtower west of Dunhuang. Since Sogdian was known to be an Aramaic-derived consonantal script (abjad), scholars reconstructed its sound values using related Middle Iranian languages (Middle Persian, Parthian). Henning pinned their date to 313–314 AD from their mention of the fall of Luoyang.
After
The letters gave a vivid record of 4th-century Silk Road trade and ordinary lives — a daughter writing to her mother in Samarkand, a merchant reporting that Luoyang had fallen, a demand to settle a debt. They confirmed Sogdian as the starting point of Eurasia's longest script lineage: Sogdian → Uyghur → Mongolian → Manchu.
Decoded signs
Glyph → phonetic → meaning
𐼰
𐼱
𐼲
𐼳
𐼶
𐼷
𐼹
𐼺
𐼿
𐽀
𐽁
The Sogdian Ancient Letters (No.1–5)
Rosetta Stone — passage by passage
01
Letter No.1 — Miwnay, a woman, writes to her mother in Samarkand: stranded in Dunhuang with no way home.
02
Letter No.2 — The merchant Nanai-vandak reports: "Luoyang is no more" — the city fallen to raiders in 311, recorded before the official Chinese histories.
03
Letter No.3 — A business report from the Dunhuang branch manager to the head accountant: what was traded, and at what price.
04
Letter No.4 — One merchant asking another for money he was promised — a debt settlement that attests the credit economy of the 4th-century Silk Road.
05
Letter No.5 — News of the family: who had married, who had had a child, who had passed away.
06MECHANICS
Reading Mechanics
Direction · Method↔
Direction
Right to Left (RTL)
Right to left; vertical writing also used in later periods.
α
System
Abjad
⌨
Input method
Direct Unicode input
Keyboard layout
Standard IME · input chart
Keyboard layout data not yet available.
07LINEAGE
The Lineage
Family · DescendantsPhylogeny
Ancestors & descendants
Phylogeny
Related scripts
Ancestors · Descendants · Family
Ancestors
Descendants
Same family
Lineage — six steps and four descendants
Eurasia's longest script lineage, from Phoenician to Manchu. Top row: Sogdian's ancestors; bottom row: its four descendants.
𐤀PhoenicianBC 1000
𐡀AramaicBC 900
𐼰SogdianBC 100
𐽰Old UyghurAD 800
ᠠMongolianAD 1204
ᠣManchuAD 1599
ᡐTodo bichigAD 1648
6
Lineage steps
4
Descendant scripts
2600+
Years of lineage
08REACH