Who were the Sogdians, the merchants who ran the Silk Road?

The Sogdians were an Iranian people from the oasis cities of Central Asia, around Samarkand and Bukhara, and they were the Silk Road's great middlemen. Most merchants never travelled the whole route. They traded through middlemen in oasis towns. The Sogdians, however, established a trading network across the 1,500 miles from Sogdiana to China. Their city-states were never politically united, but they were centred on Samarkand, and in the Silk Road trade they played an essential role as middlemen.

They took to trade so thoroughly that the Saka of Khotan called all merchants suli, "Sogdian", whatever their culture or ethnicity. The Chinese Book of Sui describes them as skilled merchants and says the Chinese regarded them as born merchants, learning their skills at an early age. The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang noted with approval that Sogdian boys were taught to read and write at five, though he was disappointed that the skill was turned to trade.

Their cargoes show the range of the network. Sogdians brought grapes, alfalfa, Sassanian silverware, glass, Mediterranean coral, brass Buddhist images, Roman wool cloth and Baltic amber to China, and took home Chinese paper, copper and silk. A tax document from the Turpan region shows twenty-nine of thirty-five transactions involved Sogdian merchants. Their trade also included people: Sogdian and Chinese merchants regularly traded in slaves in and around Turpan during the Tang dynasty.

So when we picture the land routes between Central Asia and China, many of the people moving the goods were neither Chinese nor Roman, but Sogdian.