The Sogdian language

Sogdian is an Eastern Middle Iranian language, at home in the cities of the Zarafshan and carried by their merchants along the roads to Gansu and beyond. It matters to the Göktürks for one reason above the rest. The Göktürk state wrote in Sogdian before it wrote in Turkic. Everything the state put on stone in its first century, it put there in this language.^[1]

The alphabet and where it came from

The Sogdians wrote in an alphabet that descends from Aramaic through Syriac. It existed in several variants, some of them tied to a confession rather than to a place.^[1] Sogdian colonies stood along the trade roads of Eurasia, and the script travelled with them. Wherever a Sogdian settled, the letters were available.^[1]

The alphabet came late. The Achaemenids brought writing to Sogdiana. For centuries the written language stayed the Aramaic of their empire, and administrative formulae inherited from Babylon were still in use there in the seventh century AD.^[2] Sogdian writing developed from the Aramaic alphabet only in the first or second century AD, in a variant close to Parthian. The writing of Bukhara stayed close to the Parthian.^[3] The Sogdian name for the Chinese, cyn, and for China, cynstn, the land of the Qin, came through the peoples of the steppe and the Tarim basin at the end of the third or the beginning of the second century BC.^[4]

The oldest documents in the language that touch this history are the Ancient Letters. They were probably written in 313 and were found in Gansu. They show Sogdians already resident on the Chinese frontier two centuries before the Göktürk state existed.^[5]

The two Chinese notices

The Chinese chapters contradict each other about Göktürk writing. The Zhou Shu, describing their customs, says that their written characters resemble those of the Hu (其書字類胡). In the same passage it adds that they do not know the calendar.^[6] The Sui Shu says flatly that they have no writing and notch wood to make their agreements (無文字，刻木為契).^[7] The Bei Shi reports both notices.^[1]

The Hu of the Zhou Shu’s comparison is the western foreigner, and the script it points at is the Sogdian one.^[1] Understood that way, the two notices do not contradict each other, because they describe different things. One observer saw writing at a khan’s court, where a Sogdian secretary sat. The other saw the tally-stick of a camp.

The chancery of the khans

The Bugut inscription of about 584 is the proof.^[1] It is the oldest monument the Göktürk state raised. It stands in central Mongolia. It is cut in Sogdian script and in the Sogdian language.^[1] The khaganate used the script officially in the last quarter of the sixth century, and the language with it.^[1]

The stone therefore preserves Sogdian in Göktürk service. It gives the Sogdian forms of the khans’ names, bwmyn for Bumin and mwġ’n for Mukan. It also gives the plural tr’wkt, Turkit, for the people.^[8]

The language of the embassy of 568 is disputed. Menander calls the letter that Maniakh carried to Constantinople a Scythian letter.^[9] Some think it was Turkic written in Sogdian characters. Others think it was Sogdian itself. Sogdian was a trade language of the whole of Eurasia, and for this second group a translator for it would certainly be found in Constantinople, where a translator for Turkic would not.^[1]

Translation into Turkic began under Taspar Khan. Sogdian letters are held to have carried it. The Northern Qi emperor asked Liu Shiqing, who knew the languages of the barbarians of the four directions, to render the Nirvāṇa Sūtra into Turkic. The result was sent to the khan.^[1]

The date of the adaptation to Turkic

The date is open, and the two proposals are far apart. On the first, the fitting of the Sogdian alphabet to Turkic sounds began as early as the fifth century, in the Gaochang period of the Ashina. This would make the Sogdian cursive older than the runiform writing.^[1] On the second, the adaptation proceeded step by step and served through the whole history of the Göktürk and then the Uyghur states. It was interrupted once, by a brief turn of the elites against foreign things at the beginning of the eighth century. In that period the runiform alphabet was used instead.^[10]

The origin of the letters of that runiform alphabet is a separate argument. The article on the origin of the script treats it.

Traces in Turkic

The Göktürks took words as well as letters. Among the loans from Sogdian into Turkic are the words for debt and for coin. These show what the traffic between the two peoples was about. The Uyghur stir, coin, is a borrowing from the Sogdian styr, a unit of silver already named in the Ancient Letters.^[11] Sogdian names stand in the Göktürk record from the beginning. An Nuopantuo, the hu of Jiuquan whom the Western Wei sent to Bumin in 545, bore the Sogdian name Anāhitā-banda. Maniakh, who led the first embassy west, bore a Buddhist Sogdian name.^[10]

Sogdian gave the Uyghurs religious words as well. The Mongols later took several of them over from the Uyghurs. The Manichaean texts of the Uyghurs name an Iranian deity Azrua. The Sogdian Buddhist texts use this name for Brahma, and it is understood as the Sogdian form of Zurvan. The demon Imnu, whom the Buddhists equate with Mara, is likewise understood as a Sogdian word. The Mongol word for a diadem, titim, is traced to a Sogdian form.^[12]

The alphabet outlasted the language by a long way. Its cursive variant took shape in the late seventh and early eighth century. This variant is the source of the Uyghur alphabet, and through the Uyghur alphabet of the Mongol and then the Manchu scripts.^[1]

Decline and survival

The language declined with the cities that spoke it. Sogdian culture entered a crisis in the ninth century. In the tenth century the new Persian language grew up at the Samanid court, and it took only a handful of words from Sogdian.^[13] Al-Muqaddasi, writing in the 980s, records the language of Sughd as distinct and close to the speech of the rural districts of Bukhara. He says he often heard a learned imam speak it.^[13] In the upper classes Sogdian was then a rare second language. The last generation of urban speakers was perhaps born in the first third of the tenth century.^[13] In the countryside Sogdian lived on. Yaghnobi, a very close relative, is still spoken in a valley of Tajikistan.^[13]^[14]

In the east the language went over into Turkic. Sogdian families in the Uyghur lands turkicised through intermarriage. Bilingual scribes who were thinking more and more in Turkic wrote some Sogdian Nestorian texts.^[15] One group of business documents mixes the two languages so closely that its editors named the language Turco-Sogdian.^[15] The longest survival was in the land of Argu, between Isfijab and Balasaghun. Sogdian was probably still spoken there into the twelfth century. It served the Nestorians as a liturgical language perhaps until the beginning of the thirteenth.^[16]

The letters went on eastward without it.

References

^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Golden 1992, p. 151
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 17
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 18
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 24
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 43
^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ Golden 1992
^ Menander Protector
^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 55
^ Laufer 1919, p. 572–573
^ a b c d de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 289
^ Markwart 1938, p. 180
^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 326
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 330

Sources

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Josef Markwart, Wehrot und Arang. Untersuchungen zur mythischen und geschichtlichen Landeskunde von Ostiran (1938)
Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica. Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (1919)