Decipherment of Sogdian — The Ancient Letters of Dunhuang
◈Key Scholars
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.
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.
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.
Published the first edition and translation of the Ancient Letters in 1931.
Dated the letters to 313–314 AD from their reference to the fall of Luoyang.
Produced the modern standard editions and established Sogdian grammar and lexicon.
◈How Was It Deciphered?
Sogdian is a consonant-based abjad derived from Aramaic. Scholars cross-referenced (1) the letterforms and order of Aramaic, (2) the vocabulary of related Middle Iranian languages such as Middle Persian and Parthian, and (3) historical events named inside the letters, to recover both sound values and dating.
◈Decoded Characters
◈Full Original Translation
The Sogdian Ancient Letters (summary)
Letters 1 & 3 — A woman (Miwnay (미흐나이)) writes to her mother in Samarkand, stranded in Dunhuang with no way home.
Letter 2 — The merchant Nanai-vandak reports home: "Luoyang is no more" — the city had fallen to raiders.
Letter 5 — A request to settle business debts, with news of family.
◈The Full Story
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.
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.
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.