# Sogdians The **Sogdians** were an Eastern Iranian people of the Zarafshan valley — Samarkand, Bukhara, Panjikent — who between roughly the fourth and eighth centuries operated the commercial spine of the Silk Road. Not an empire and rarely independent, they built instead a merchant diaspora: family firms with resident agents in the Chinese capitals and across Central Asia, a credit and consignment system, and a language that became the lingua franca of overland trade. Their significance exceeds commerce. Sogdian merchants and missionaries carried [[Buddhism]], Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity and [[Zoroastrianism]] along their routes, and Sogdian communities in Tang China produced musicians, soldiers, and administrators — An Lushan, whose rebellion broke the Tang, was of Sogdian-Turkic descent. The **Ancient Letters**, a merchant's undelivered correspondence abandoned near Dunhuang around 313 and recovered in 1907, are the earliest surviving business papers from the network. > [!note] Stub > Spine stub. Expand: the city-states and their politics, the diaspora structure and the Ancient Letters, Sogdians in Tang China, the art of Panjikent, and the Turkic-Islamic absorption after the eighth century.