Sogdian Ancient Letter No. 2
A Sogdian merchant in Gansu wrote home to his partner in Samarkand, about 3,000 kilometres west, with terrible news: famine, the emperor fled, Luoyang sacked. The letter never arrived. It was still in a mailbag in a ruined watchtower west of Dunhuang nearly sixteen hundred years later. We can read it because the post failed.
Based on the original, the British Library, London.
Found: a collapsed Han watchtower west of Dunhuang, Gansu, found by Aurel Stein in 1907.
What it is
A letter on paper, written in Sogdian, the language of the merchant cities around Samarkand, and folded small for carrying. The sender, Nanai-vandak, was one of the Sogdian traders settled in the towns of the Gansu corridor. He reports the sack of Luoyang, the Chinese capital, which happened in 311, and Nicholas Sims-Williams dates the letter to 313. That date is his and is broadly accepted.
Why it never arrived
It was one of a small bundle of letters found together in the ruins of a watchtower on the Han frontier wall. Something stopped that mailbag between the towns of the corridor and the road west, and it stayed put. Nobody knows what.
A word worth noticing
The letter blames the disaster on people it calls xwn, Huns. The Chinese histories name the attackers as Xiongnu. Whether the Xiongnu of China and the Huns who later reached Rome were connected is an old argument, and this letter is one of the few pieces of evidence that sits squarely in the middle of it. It proves what one merchant called them, not who they were.
Post, not a manuscript
It is a business letter: news, money, instructions. Its value to us is that it was never meant for us.
- Sims-Williams, 'The Sogdian Ancient Letter II', in Schmidt (ed.), Philologica et Linguistica: Festschrift für Helmut Humbach (2001)
- de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
- Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road (2nd ed., 2015)
- Picture: made with AI for The Ember Atlas, an imagining, not a record of how it looked.