The Ancient Sogdian Letters
or
"Return to Sender if Undeliverable after 1,787 Years"
© 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. For a brief summary of Chinese history,
including this period, see China
In Brief.
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 excellent article.
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."
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