Sogdian merchants made the Silk Road’s middle language
Lying between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, in today’s Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the Sogdian city-states never unified but looked to Samarkand. Their Eastern Iranian language served traders across Central Asia and was used at the court of the First Turkic Khaganate.
Sogdia lay between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, north of Bactria and east of Khwarezm, taking in the fertile Zeravshan valley that Greeks called the Polytimetus—roughly today’s Samarkand and Bukhara regions and Tajikistan’s Sughd. Its towns are old: Sarazm in Tajikistan reaches back to the fourth millennium BCE and Kök Tepe near Bulungur to at least the fifteenth century BCE. Young Avestan texts call the Sogdian homeland Gava and rank it second among the good lands made by Ahura Mazda. Oswald Szemerényi traced the name itself to an ancient word for archer.
Cyrus the Great conquered the region between 546 and 539 BCE, and Darius I brought Aramaic script and coinage and drafted Sogdians as soldiers and cavalry; some fought in Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480 BCE, and Susa’s palace boasted Sogdian lapis lazuli and carnelian. The province probably slipped Persian control around 400 BCE. Alexander took the Sogdian Rock in 327 BCE and married Roxana, daughter of the nobleman Oxyartes, while the warlord Spitamenes led a revolt that ended with his beheading.
Military power never returned, and Greco-Bactrian kings, Saka nomads, and the Yuezhi took turns in control; the Chinese envoy Zhang Qian visited in 126 BCE seeking an alliance against the Xiongnu. The Sogdians never built an empire of their own. Their city-states, centred on Samarkand but never united, instead grew rich as middlemen, with merchants reaching Byzantium and families rising in the army and government of Tang China (618–907).
Their Eastern Iranian language became a Central Asian lingua franca and a written court language of the First Turkic Khaganate. Believers followed Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Buddhism until conversion to Islam began with the eighth-century Arab conquest and was nearly complete by 999, when New Persian had largely displaced Sogdian. Only Yaghnobi, spoken in Tajikistan, descends from it today.
Source: Sogdia
