Sogdian Alphabet - Source Materials

Source Materials

The Sogdian script is known from religious texts of Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Christianity, as well as from secular sources such as letters, coins, and legal documents. The oldest known Sogdian documents are the Ancient Letters, found in 1920 by Sir Aurel Stein in a watchtower near Dunhuang, China. These letters date to approximately 312-313 C.E. and are written in Early Sogdian.

The Sogdian Buddhist texts, written in the sutra script, are younger, dating to approximately the sixth to eighth or ninth century. They were found during the first two decades of the twentieth century in one of the caves of the Thousand Buddhas in the Chinese province of Gansu. The bulk of these manuscripts reside in the British Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

Another important discovery was of the Mug Documents in 1933 by Soviet scholars. These documents were found in the remains of a fortress on Mount Mug in northern Tajikistan. The documents, numbering over 76, were written on many different types of materials, such as paper, silk, wood, and skin. According to the dates on the documents, they date to the eighth century C.E. The majority of them were written using the Sogdian cursive script.