Old Sogdian Alphabet Table

Five Sogdian merchant letters written around 312-313 CE in Old Sogdian - the oldest known substantial Sogdian documents. They were found in 1907 by Sir Aurel Stein in a watchtower near Dunhuang, China: mail posted by Sogdian traders that never reached its recipients, preserved by the desert. Their contents - news of the chaos in China after the fall of Luoyang, prices, family business - made them the founding texts of Sogdian studies and the primary evidence for how this chart’s letterforms were read.

From the Aramaic alphabet - specifically the Imperial Aramaic that served as the Persian empire’s chancery script. When Sogdian needed writing, scribes adapted the Aramaic letterforms and, remarkably, kept Aramaic logograms: signs that stand for whole Sogdian words (function words like pronouns and conjunctions) while being read as Sogdian, not as their Aramaic values. It is a textbook case of script adaptation: letters borrowed, sound values remapped, word-signs inherited as fossils.

Formally an abjad - consonants are written, short vowels usually not - but with alphabet-like tendencies that make it a transition case. Long vowels are marked with matres lectionis (the consonant letters aleph, waw and yodh doubling as vowel carriers), as in Aramaic; unlike most abjads, though, Sogdian carriers also came to express some short vowels. Later Sogdian scripts took the trend further with positional letterforms and fuller vowel marking - a gradual drift from abjad toward alphabet across the script’s thousand-year history.

The script evolved into three main later varieties: the sutra script (a calligraphic hand for Buddhist scriptures, from around 500 CE), the so-called “Uyghur” cursive (a baseline-connected hand a century later), alongside the early non-cursive type this chart shows. Sogdian was written in three scripts in total - this line, plus the Manichaean and Syriac alphabets for religious communities. The line’s greatest legacy came through the cursive: adapted by the Uyghurs, it became the Old Uyghur alphabet, parent of the Mongolian and Manchu scripts still written vertically today.

The Unicode block includes four number signs (1, 10, 20 and 100 - enough for the dating and counting formulas of letters and documents) and six punctuation signs, mostly variants of vertical bars and dotted circles that mark clause boundaries in the letters. The ten combining marks are the block’s diacritics: dots, curves and hooks placed under or over letters - including one shaped like a small resh - used in scholarly editions and for specific scribal conventions. This chart lists all 42 codepoints so a transcription can reproduce an inscription exactly, auxiliaries included.