The Sogdians

If one people deserves to be called the merchants of the Silk Roads, it is the Sogdians. Their homeland, Sogdiana, lay around Samarkand and Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. They spoke an Iranian language, and from roughly the fourth to the eighth century AD they ran trading networks stretching from Iran to northern China. Sogdian families settled in Chinese cities, where their communities had their own headmen, temples and cemeteries, and many Sogdians served Chinese and Turkic rulers as interpreters, envoys and soldiers.

Their influence outlasted their trade. The Sogdian alphabet, itself descended from Aramaic, was adopted by the Uyghurs, and the Uyghur script in turn was adapted for Mongolian. So the Old Uyghur and Mongolian scripts descend from Sogdian writing, a reminder that merchants carry letters in more than one sense.

Letters that never arrived

In 1907 the archaeologist Aurel Stein found a mailbag in a ruined watchtower west of Dunhuang. Inside were eight letters in Sogdian, now called the Ancient Letters, written around AD 313 and never delivered. One, from a merchant in China to his partners in Samarkand, reports catastrophe: the emperor has fled the capital, Luoyang has burned, and the foreigners in the city have died or been ruined. It matches Chinese accounts of the sack of Luoyang in 311.

Two others were written by a woman named Miwnay. Her husband had left her stranded in Dunhuang with their daughter, and the debts he left behind meant no one would help her. She had appealed to relatives and to his business associates and been refused; she was reduced to depending on charity from a temple. In anger she told him she would rather be the wife of a dog or a pig than his. Her letter is one of the earliest surviving voices of a woman on the Silk Roads, and it shows the human cost when long distance trade failed.

What moved besides silk

The goods were wonderfully varied. Horses and camels went east into China. Jade came from Khotan. Glass from the Roman and Persian worlds was prized in China, where glassmaking was less advanced. Spices, medicines, incense, dyes, metals, furs, paper and books moved in both directions. So did enslaved people, who were bought and sold at frontier markets.

Silk itself often worked less as a luxury than as cash. In the Tang period, the Chinese government sent huge quantities of plain silk to its western garrisons, where it served as money, used to pay soldiers in bolts. Soldiers then spent the silk locally, which is one reason Hansen sees the state as the region's main economic engine. Silver coins from Sasanian Iran also circulated in the oasis markets of Turfan.

Documents from the dead

Much of what we know comes from an unlikely source. At the Astana cemetery near Turfan, families dressed the dead in paper shoes, hats and belts, and coffins were lined with paper. The paper was not new. Undertakers bought discarded documents, so contracts, tax lists, letters and court records were recycled into clothing for the dead, and the dry climate preserved them. Archaeologists have pieced the cutouts back together to reconstruct daily life.

One document from Turfan, written in Sogdian and dated 639, records the sale of an enslaved girl, described as born in Turkestan, to a Chinese Buddhist monk for a price in silver coins, with witnesses named. It is a business form like any other, which is exactly what makes it chilling. Trade that connected cultures also treated some human beings as goods.

Passes and lodgings

Travel was regulated. A traveler in Tang territory needed an official pass that listed companions, animals and goods, and officials at each checkpoint checked that the people and beasts matched the paper. Further west, especially in later Islamic lands, merchants stayed in caravanserais: walled inns built around a courtyard, with rooms for people above or beside stalls for animals, spaced roughly a day's march apart.

Worked example: reading Miwnay's letter as evidence

Suppose you want to know how Sogdian merchant families worked. What can one angry letter tell you? First, it shows that families stretched across great distances: Miwnay's husband had gone on business and not returned, and her mother lived elsewhere. Second, it shows that credit and reputation bound the network together. Because her husband owed money, his associates refused her help, which suggests that debts were treated as family obligations. Third, it shows the vulnerability of those left behind. A woman alone in a frontier town depended on kin, partners and religious charity, and when all three failed she had little recourse.

Now consider the limits. The letter gives one side of a quarrel, and we do not know the husband's reasons. It was never delivered, so we do not know whether anyone answered. A careful historian treats it as strong evidence for feelings and social pressures, weaker evidence for exact events, and evidence that must be set beside others, such as the Turfan contracts, before drawing general conclusions. Still, without letters like this, the Silk Roads would be a story only of goods and kings. Miwnay reminds us that each caravan left people behind, and that their dignity was at stake too.