Who really built the Silk Roads?
Diasporas along the Silk Roads
Maps make the Silk Roads look simple. They show a bright ribbon stretching from China to the Mediterranean, as if caravans marched in neat lines from one end to the other. But there were no lines holding this system together. There weren’t even many actual roads. People connected the Silk Roads. Individuals did the work of traveling and buying and selling goods along short circuits in port cities and oasis towns, from Guangzhou to Samarkand to Venice.
Among the tens of thousands of merchants, missionaries, investors, emissaries, and others who made the Silk Roads function, perhaps the most critical were the migrants—and their descendants—who kept one foot in a distant homeland even as they put the other in a new city. They kept the system going by speaking many languages, building families across borders, and trading on reputation. Together, they made up the diaspora communities of the Silk Roads.
Diaspora[1] communities were the connective tissue of long-distance trade networks, serving as interlocutors whose unique skills and history facilitated trade between different worlds. Arab and Persian merchants dotted the Indian Ocean as Chinese merchants spread across Southeast Asia, often overlapping with one another. The Jewish diaspora facilitated trade between Christians and Muslims across the medieval Silk Roads. Jewish communities thrived in hundreds of different Christian and Muslim cities along the Silk Roads. Their connections to each other and to these two worlds made them trusted intermediaries between two worlds that often came into conflict during the medieval period.
Let’s focus on one diaspora that rarely gets much recognition despite its crucial role in opening and maintaining thousands of miles of connections in the early, often precarious centuries of the ancient Silk Roads. We’ll explore this community through a primary source collection: a sack of undelivered letters from the fourth century CE. This was a time of political and social upheaval in many places. The Han Dynasty had collapsed, and China faced waves of invaders from the steppes to the north. Other classical Eurasian empires had also collapsed or were in decline. In the context of turmoil, this diaspora took center stage on the Silk Roads.
Silk and societal collapse
I’m talking about the Sogdians. Now, you may have never heard of this diasporic community. When people talk about who “built” the Silk Roads, a lot of attention is placed on the twin pillars of the ancient world—the Roman and Han Empires. We hear of Zhang Qian, who traveled far and wide to connect China to the Parthian Empire and the many communities of Central Asia. Or the envoys of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who arrived in China by ship in 166 CE (they were probably imposters—either Roman, Greek, or Persian merchants posing as envoys).
And yes, the first long-distance connections of the Silk Roads were forged thanks to the stability offered by the four large empires of Rome, Han, Parthia, and Kushan. But from 200 to 500 CE, each of those empires declined and collapsed, sending the Silk Roads into a period of decline as bandits and danger became more common across those routes. In the absence of large empires to ensure security of merchants and their goods, others stepped into the void and rebuilt the connections between distant peoples. The Romans and the Han Dynasty might have been the bookends of the ancient world, but it was the Sogdians who were writing the tales of the ancient Silk Roads.
Who were the Sogdians?
The Sogdians were Central Asian people who built merchant networks from their bases in city-states like Samarkand and Bukhara. They established trading colonies along the Silk Roads, acting as interpreters, bankers, and caravan leaders. Their language became a lingua franca[2] across the ancient Silk Roads. Over time, the Sogdians were repeatedly integrated into various empires, including the Achaemenid Persians, the successor states of Alexander the Great, the Kushan Empire, the Sassanian Empire, the Turkic Khanate, and the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. As they spread across Eurasia and built enclaves in distant cities, the Sogdians’ most important role was as intermediary between the pastoral nomads of the steppes and the sedentary agriculturalists of China. From Duhuang in Western China to Crimea on the Black Sea, Sogdian merchants maintained Silk Road connections while the Chinese, Kushan, Parthian, and Roman Empires faltered.
Miwnay's unhappy marriage
In 1907, an archaeologist named Aurel Stein was working around the oasis town of Dunhuang on the eastern edge of the Gobi Desert. Near a ruined watchtower, he found an undelivered sack of letters. The five letters are from the early fourth century CE, and they are the oldest examples of Sogdian writing in the world. These are not the grand proclamations of Han diplomats or Roman emperors. They are from ordinary people living through a time of societal collapse.
Two of the letters are written by a Sogdian woman named Miwnay. Living in Dunhuang, Miwnay wrote to her mother, Chatis, who lived in Samarkand, nearly 1,500 miles away. Miwnay described how her husband, Nanai‑dhat, had abandoned her and their daughter, Shayn, forcing her to rely on charity from the Zoroastrian temple to survive. Miwnay’s second letter is to her husband, blaming him for leaving her destitute:
I obeyed your command and came to Dunhuang, and I did not observe my mother’s bidding nor my brothers’. Surely? the gods were angry with me on the day when I did your bidding! I would rather be a dog’s or a pig’s wife than yours!
In a postscript to the letter, the daughter, Shayn, informs her father that they have been forced to become servants to Chinese residents of the town.
The other letters are from merchants reporting on business dealings and important political events. From these letters, the fragility of the world that Miwnay inhabited is clear. One Sogdian merchant, Nanai-vandak, wrote from Jincheng, about 500 miles east of Dunhuang. He shares with his partners in Samarkand that the palace in the Chinese capital of Luoyang had been burned and the city sacked by the Huns while the emperor fled. Other disasters, such as famine, compounded this political instability. Nanai-vandak writes of his associates who had gone “inside” China and had yet to send their normal reports. One of his contacts had written to inform him that the Sogdians in Luoyang “had all died of starvation.” The letter concludes with Nanai-vandak’s last will and testament, as he believes he is close to death.
Despite the social troubles highlighted by these letters, the Sogdians did not disappear as intermediaries. To the contrary, from the fifth to seventh centuries CE, Chinese sources begin referring to Sogdian leaders in North China using the title sabao—meaning caravan chief. These government-appointed members of the Sogdian diaspora in China often had administrative duties, and their tombs were among the most elaborate of the period.
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These ancient Sogdian letters highlight both the precarity of life on the Silk Roads, but also the remarkable communication networks that linked diaspora communities, stretching from Luoyang to Samarkand—over 2,500 miles. News and information about who could be trusted and what goods were selling moved through this network, from oasis to oasis, city to city, across desert and steppe. Letters like these dealt with the stuff of trade—textiles and metals, aromatics like musk and pepper. But more important, the letters reveal the social technology of diaspora, which linked a community across great distance and facilitated cultural and economic exchanges. Traditions of hospitality, shared language and rituals, and the expectation that a merchant’s family would pay his debts maintained a network of trust. Diasporas lowered the costs of doing business by offering interlocutors who could facilitate trade between communities that were otherwise hostile—such as the Chinese and steppe empires—by making trust portable. The efforts of diasporic communities like the Sogdians helped the Silk Road networks expand when empires were strong, and during periods of disorder and chaos, they worked to maintain the fraying connections between distant communities.
Looking for teaching materials on the Silk Roads? Check out our Silk Roads collection now, and consider joining our free talk on November 5 with bestselling author and UNESCO Professor of Silk Roads Studies Peter Frankopan!
1. A diaspora refers to a group of people who have—by choice or by force—been scattered from their homeland to different parts of the world but who still maintain connections to their homeland, culture, and each other.
2. A lingua franca is a common language that people who speak different native languages use to communicate with each other, especially for trade or travel.
About the author: Bennett Sherry is one of the historians working on OER Project. He received his PhD in world history from the University of Pittsburgh and has taught courses in world history, human rights, and the modern Middle East. Bennett is a recipient of the Pioneer in World History award from the World History Association, and is coauthor of The Long Nineteenth Century, 1750–1914: Crucible of Modernity (2nd ed).
Cover image: Camel with Musicians. Glazed earthenware, H. 58.4 cm. Excavated in 1957 from tomb, dated to 723 CE, of Xianyu Tinghui, general of Yunhui, in western suburbs of Chang’an (Xi’an)
National Museum of China, Beijing. Courtesy and © National Museum of China.