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312
THE ALPHABET
A. Gruenwedel, Alt-Kutscha, Berlin, 1920; Recherches archéologiques en Asie Centrale, Paris, 1931.
A. von Le Coq, Auf Hellas Spuren in Ost-Turkestan, Leipsic, 1926, and others.
The Sogdian speech and script (Fig. 143-144) were widely used in Central Asia for many centuries, and particularly in the second half of the first millennium A.D., as proved by the trilingual (Turki, Sogdian and Chinese) inscription of the ninth century found in the vicinity of Qara Balgasun, on the Orkhon, the then capital of the vast Uighur Empire.
This important monument seems to mark the northern limit of the diffusion of ancient Sogdian, while its southern limit seems to be marked by a stone inscription, consisting of 6 lines, discovered at Ladakh, on the Tibetan frontier.
Sogdian was actually for a long time the lingua franca of Central Asia. As the result of the Mongolian and Arabian conquests, Sogdian slowly died out, although "a poor descendant" of it is still to be found in the valley of Yagna b.
Many fragments of Sogdian manuscripts (Fig. 143, 1) were found in eastern Turkestan at Turfan; others were discovered at Ch'ien- or Ts'ien-fo-tung, the "Caves of the Thousand Buddhas," in Tun-huang, Kansu, N.-W. China. The manuscripts extant are now in London (British Museum and India Office), Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale), Leningrad (Academy of Science) and Berlin (Prussian Academy of Science).
The decipherment of Sogdian is due to the labours of various scholars, especially the Germans F. C. Andreas and F. W. Mueller, and the French R. Gauthiot. The manuscripts are mainly of a religious nature, Christian, Manichæan or Buddhist. The earliest manuscripts extant (those found at Ts'ien-fo-tung) belong to the second century A.D., but the great majority of the other texts belong to the eighth, and perhaps ninth century A.D.
The Sogdian script (Fig. 144), of which there were a few varieties, was, like the Semitic alphabets, purely consonantal. The vowels a, i, and were often left unmarked, but sometimes they were expressed by the use of the consonants aleph, y, and w: aleph could express the long or short a; y, the long or short i, or the long e; w, the long or short u, or the long o. Sometimes, however, two aleph were employed, or the combination aleph-y or aleph-w.
The Sogdian script also contained some Aramaic ideograms, but not as many as the Pahlavi scripts; see above.
The Sogdian alphabet descended from a local cursive variety of the Aramaic scripts, perhaps from early Pahlavik; later, it was influenced by the Nestorians, as we may assume from the fact that many Sogdian manuscripts have been found dealing with Nestorian Christianity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
R. Gauthiot, De l'alphabet sogdien, "JOURNAL ASIATIQUE," 1911.
Essai de grammaire sogdien. I, by R. Gauthiot, Paris, 1914-23; II, by E. Benveniste, Paris, 1929
