Sogdian, Bactrian and the lost eastern languages

In 1907 the explorer Aurel Stein found a mailbag in a ruined watchtower west of Dunhuang, on the edge of the Chinese desert. It held letters, folded and addressed, that had never been delivered. They were written in Sogdian, early in the fourth century CE, by merchants far from home. One is from a woman abandoned by her husband in Dunhuang, who tells him plainly what she thinks of him. These ‘Ancient Letters’ are among the earliest witnesses of a language that once carried the trade of the Silk Road.

Sogdian was an Eastern Iranian language, the speech of Sogdiana, the land of Samarkand, Bukhara and Panjakent. Sogdian merchants settled in colonies across Central Asia and China, and their script, derived from Aramaic, had a remarkable afterlife: it was adapted for Old Uyghur, which in turn gave rise to the Mongolian and Manchu scripts. Among the most famous later finds are the documents from Mount Mugh, in Tajikistan, the archive of the ruler Dewashtich in the early eighth century, the time of the Arab conquest of Sogdiana.

Greek letters in Afghanistan

Further south, in the land of Balkh, Bactrian was written in the Greek alphabet, a legacy of the successors of Alexander. It became the official language of the Kushan empire. The Rabatak inscription, found in northern Afghanistan in 1993, records the emperor Kanishka ordering that edicts be issued in ‘the Aryan language’ rather than Greek. Since the 1990s, a large group of Bactrian letters and legal documents, from roughly the fourth to the eighth century, has come to light and been deciphered, chiefly by Nicholas Sims-Williams: contracts, marriage settlements and complaints from the valleys of the Hindu Kush.

Khwarezmian, Saka and the survivors

Khwarezmian, the language of the oasis on the lower Oxus, survived longest of the old written eastern languages, into the Mongol age, in glosses and quotations. Al-Biruni, the polymath of Khwarazm, recorded its month names and calendar. Further east, in the kingdom of Khotan on the southern Silk Road, Khotanese Saka was written in an Indian script and has left a large Buddhist literature.

As Persian spread with Islam and the Samanid court, these languages gave way. Yet the eastern branch is not extinct. Yaghnobi, spoken in the Yaghnob valley of Tajikistan, descends from a dialect close to Sogdian. The Pamir languages, such as Shughni and Wakhi, live on in Badakhshan on both sides of the Panj, and Pashto and Ossetian are Eastern Iranian languages spoken by millions. The poet Rudaki was born in a Sogdian land, and the language he wrote in, Persian, carried words from these older tongues.