Sogdian

Sogdian is the Eastern Middle Iranian language of Sogdiana, the land of Samarkand between the Oxus and the Jaxartes, and the working language of the Silk Road at its height: for most of the first millennium CE, a trader’s letter from the Chinese frontier to Samarkand was written in Sogdian. Its earliest substantial documents are the Ancient Letters, a mailbag of private correspondence abandoned in a watchtower west of Dunhuang around 313 CE; after them come inscriptions, contracts, and a large religious literature, Buddhist, Manichaean, and Christian, reaching into the tenth century. The language gave way to Persian and Turkic after the Islamic conquest, surviving today only in the Yaghnobi speech of a Tajik mountain valley.

Sogdian was written in scripts descended, like most of Iran’s, from imperial Aramaic. The formal early hand of the Ancient Letters is encoded in Unicode as Old Sogdian, and this atlas uses it for forms attested there; the later cursive “sutra script,” ancestor of the Uyghur and thence the Mongolian scripts, carries the bulk of the literature. The script writes consonants and long vowels only, so readings are conventional: the same skeleton swγδ serves the land’s own name, and scholars romanize the letters (with γ for the voiced velar fricative and δ for the dental) rather than guessing at every vowel.

@misc{onomastikon-sogdian,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Sogdian},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/sogdian}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}