The Ancient Sogdian Letters

 By Kate Lingley

© 2000 Kate Lingley
(No reproduction of this article without the express written permission of the author.)

The First Emperor of China, Qin Shihuangdi (of terra-cotta warrior fame) was purportedly the first to set up an efficient nation-wide postal system, involving government hostels at set intervals along main travel routes where letter carriers (and other travelling officials) could change horses or rest for the night.

In the early years of this century, the Belgian-born British explorer Sir Aurel Stein made his famed expeditions along the Silk Road, discovering and mapping many ancient sites and collecting materials for the British Museum’s collections. Among his discoveries was a group of abandoned documents in a corner of one of the signal towers at the the western end of the Great Wall. The documents appear to be a collection of letters, some written in Chinese on bamboo slips, silk, and paper, and some in other languages of the Silk Road, including Sogdian. For more on Sogdians and their culture, see Albert Dien’s excellentarticle. Given that some of the Sogdian letters date to 312 and 313, during the chaos surrounding the fall of the Eastern Jin dynasty, it has been suggested that what Stein found was in fact an abandoned mailbag, lost during the upheaval of war and preserved by the arid desert environment..

The letters are fragmentary although some are better preserved than others; some were written by Sogdian immigrants living in China — in one, the writer complains to her mother that she has been abandoned by her husband and forced into servitude to the Chinese — “I shall have to learn how to be polite to the Chinese,” she writes, and later: “I’d rather be a dog’s or a pig’s wife than his.” Others were written by businessmen keeping in touch with the home office in Samarkand or Bukhara. The scholar W.B. Henning has described these as “letters in which they complained of postal difficulties (almost the chief content of the Letters) and the troubled times, listed the latest commodity prices and the exchange value of silver, gave news of their families, and gossiped about their friends.” The following is the text of the most complete and most clearly dated letter, written by a Sogdian merchant living in Suzhou, which I have paraphrased from the literal translation given in Henning’s article (“The Date of the Sogdian Ancient Letters,” SOAS Bulletin 12 (3), 1948):

“From Nanai-vandak to Nanai-thvar in Samarkand: Sir, I am well, Armatsach in Dunhuang is well, and Arsach in Liangzhou is well, and the one whom you sent me to be outfitted, Ghoramsach, was well when he left me. He has gone on to south China, and we have no news of him. No Sogdians have come from the south of late. The last Emperor, so they say, fled from Kaiyuan because of the famine. And his palace and fortified town were set on fire, and the palace burned down and the town was destroyed. So Kaiyuan is no more, and Luoyang is no more! The Huns have entered China and have overrun Chang’an, and pillaged the land up to the city of Ye, these Huns who only yesterday had been the Emperor’s property! Then, Sir, we do not know whether the remnant Chinese were able to drive those Huns out of China, or if they retreated to their other land. And in Dunhuang, there are one hundred noblemen from Samarkand, and in Liangzhou there are forty men… And sir, if I wrote and told you all the details of how China fared, it would be a story of debts and woe; you have no wealth from it…. And since the last debacle, I receive no reply from the agents I sent into China for you, as to how they fare. When Artixw-vandak had reached Luoyang, all the Indians and Sogdians there had died from hunger. Then I sent Nasyan on to Dunhuang.”