The Sogdian Ancient Letters are a handful of letters. Sogdian merchants and their families wrote them in the Gansu corridor at the beginning of the fourth century, and they never reached the people they were written to.[1] They are the earliest Sogdian commercial documents.[2] One of them, Letter II, was written in Gansu for a merchant in Samarkand. It is one of the very few documents that prove a Sogdian network, an organisation that directed trade at a distance, rather than an aggregate of pedlars.[2] The same letter reports the fall of Luoyang. It gives the destroyers of the city a name: xwn, the Huns.[3]

Discovery

The explorer Aurel Stein found the letters in 1907, still sealed. They lay in a rubbish heap that blocked one of the corridors of a ruined Han guard tower, number XIIa. The tower stands ninety kilometres west of Dunhuang, near the western end of the Chinese frontier line.[1] The letters are written on paper, in the Sogdian language and the Sogdian script, and they are partly damaged.[1] Hans Reichelt edited them in 1931. They are now in the British Library under the numbers Or. 8212/92–101.[1]

Date

Letter II reports that Luoyang, one of the Chinese capitals, had been sacked. The city was sacked three times, in 190, in 311 and in 535.[1] The palaeography and the quality of the paper rule out 535.[4] Between the other two dates, the details decide. The letter has the emperor flee Luoyang in a famine. That happened in 311. In 190 the dictator Dong Zhuo made the emperor leave, and the famine began only in 193.[4] One reckoning therefore dates the letters to 313. A second argued for 196, and a later study returned to the first. The date now generally given is 313.[1]

Letter II

Letter II is addressed to “the noble lord Varzakk son of Nanai-thvār of the family Kānakk” and sent “by his servant Nanai-vandak”.[3] Nanai-vandak ran the network in Gansu and China. Varzakk sat in Samarkand. Below Nanai-vandak stood the local agents, men settled in the towns of the corridor or sent out more recently.[5]

The letter opens with the agents. Armat-sāch in Jiuquan is safe and well, and Arsāch in Guzang, the later Wuwei, is safe and well.[3] Then it turns to China. It is three years since a Sogdian came from “inside”, from China.[3] The last emperor, “so they say”, fled Luoyang because of the famine, and fire was set to his palace and to the city. “Srg [Luoyang] is no more, ’nkp’ [Ye] is no more!”[3] The devastation reached as far as Ye. It was the work of the Huns, “these (same) Huns [who] yesterday were the emperor’s subjects”.[3] Nanai-vandak did not know whether the Chinese who were left had driven the Huns out of Chang’an.[3] A caravan he had sent four years earlier reached Luoyang to find that “the Indians and the Sogdians there had all died of starvation”.[3]

The rest is business and family. In one town of China there were a hundred free men from Samarkand, in another forty.[3] Nanai-vandak asked Varzakk to secure a deposit of staters held by a third man and to add the interest to the capital. He commended an orphan to Varzakk. He also asked that Takhsīch-vandak be given a wife when he was grown and not be sent away.[3] Thirty-two vesicles of musk were on their way from Dunhuang, to be divided in five shares.[3] “And day after day we are expecting to be killed or robbed.”[3] The letter is dated in the year 13 of a Lord Chirth-swān, in the month Taghmīch.[3]

Letter II alone was meant for a distant city, and it alone was wrapped twice, in linen and in a silk cloth.[6] The linen cover still bears the words ”… to send to Samarkand …”.[3] The names of the addressees stand on the back, so the letter carried two addresses. It went first to someone at Loulan, on the road west, who was to send it on to Samarkand with a caravan.[6]

The other letters

Letters I and III were written at Dunhuang by a woman, Miunai. The first is to her mother Catisa, the second to her husband Nanai-dhat, with a postscript by her daughter.[3] They were probably meant for Loulan.[4] Letter III tells of a family left behind: “through the guilt of Farnxunt … we have become the servants of the Chinamen, I as well as my mother”.[3] The mother’s name, Catisa, is a name found in the documents of the kingdom of Loulan. Her daughter married a Sogdian. At Loulan, Sogdian and Indian families were joined by marriage.[7] Letter V was sent from Guzang by Frī-khwatāw to “the chief merchant Aspandhāt”.[3] Letter VI is from Farnxunt, the head of the family at Dunhuang.[8]

Four of the letters name goods. Letter II has linen cloth, woollen cloth and musk. Letter IV has gold and wine, Letter V pepper and silver, and Letter VI camphor.[3] The camphor and the pepper came from as far as Southeast Asia and India. The musk came from the Tibetan edge of the Gansu corridor.[9] Some of the words of trade in the letters are Indian loans: the word for caravan, the word for price and the word for letter.[7]

The letters were found together but written in different places. No Chinese or Indian letter lay with them.[4] The man who carried them went from one Sogdian community to the next. The Sogdians of Gansu therefore kept a post of their own, for family news as well as for business.[6]

The name xwn

Letter II gives the Xiongnu who sacked Luoyang the name xwn, the Huns. This is sixty years before the Huns of Europe crossed the Roman frontier.[2] On the date of 313, these Huns were the armies of the Xiongnu state of Han. Its ruler Liu Cong took Luoyang in 311, and his house had lived inside the frontier as subjects of the emperor. The letter’s “yesterday the emperor’s subjects” fits them. A second letter of the same period names the Huns as well, in its fifth line. It is a fragment of twenty lines that Stein found south-west of Loulan and that has never been edited.[1] A woman wrote it, and it speaks of comings and goings and of selling.[1]

The letter settles what the Sogdians of Gansu called the Xiongnu of their day. It does not settle what the name implies. The Chinese 匈奴, the Sogdian xwn and the name of the Huns of Europe may be one name that travelled with a people. Others allow the name and deny the people. The question belongs to the Huns and to the Xiongnu, where both positions are set out.

Reliability

Letter II is a letter from the frontier, not a chronicle. What it reports about the emperor it reports as hearsay. The passage on the Huns is broken, and the translation has to mark its readings as uncertain.[3] What it reports about the Sogdians is first-hand: the names of the agents, the towns they held, the money, the musk and the fear. It shows a Sogdian network in Gansu in the fourth century with its centre in Samarkand. It shows the network at the moment the Chinese world around it collapsed.[5]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 45
  2. ^ a b c de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 43
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Sogdian Ancient Letters
  4. ^ a b c d de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 46
  5. ^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 48
  6. ^ a b c de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 47
  7. ^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 76
  8. ^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 56
  9. ^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 51

Sources

Literature

  • Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)

Articles resting on this source 11

Chang'an · Dunhuang · Huns · Jiuquan · Luoyang · Nanai-vandak · Sabao · Sogdians · The Huns and the Xiongnu · Wuwei · Xiongnu Han

Related

What links here9

Persons
Nanai-vandak
States
Xiongnu Han
Places
Dunhuang · Jiuquan · Loulan
Peoples
Sogdians
Languages
The Sogdian language
Sources
Sogdian inscriptions of the upper Indus
Controversies
The Huns and the Xiongnu

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Sogdian Ancient Letters.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/sogdian-ancient-letters/

Last revised: 8 November 2026