Eastern Iranian-speaking people of the oasis cities around Samarkand and Bukhara, the Sogdians built no great empire — but from roughly the fourth to the eighth century CE they were the working merchants of the overland Silk Road, organizing caravans and planting trading colonies as far as China. Sogdian served as the common commercial language of the routes, and Sogdian traders carried goods, religions, and alphabets across Eurasia. The Arab conquest absorbed them, yet historians now recognize them as the indispensable connectors who made the Silk Road function.
They built no great empire and are barely remembered, yet for centuries they may have been the people who actually moved the Silk Road. The Sogdians were merchants from a cluster of oasis cities around Samarkand, and they spread east in a long chain of trading colonies that reached deep into China. To be a merchant in much of Asia was, in some places, simply to be called a Sogdian. They carried far more than silk. Along their caravan routes traveled gods and scripts: Sogdian traders and translators helped transmit Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Christianity within China and along the Silk Roads, and their alphabet became an ancestor of the Mongolian script. We glimpse their world in a bundle of private letters dropped in a watchtower near Dunhuang and in the painted walls of their buried town at Panjikent.