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For the past week, I have been preparing a major post on Middle Iranian and associated peoples who transited and traded across Eurasia during the Middle Ages, so it was fortuitous that I received the following photograph from Hiroshi Kumamoto:

Xinhua News Agency//Getty Images

It shows a Sogdian camelteer and horse groom, typical types of expertise of the Sogdians, who were merchants par excellence on the medieval Eurasian trade routes.  The man's blond hair doesn't surprise me in the slightest, because I have seen it in Central Asian mummies and their descendants in Eastern Central Asia (ECA, aka Xinjiang), Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan,Tajikistan, etc., not to mention countless historical visual materials from the medieval period.

For a small foretaste of what's in store for the Sogdians in medieval Korea that will be part of the forthcoming post on Sogdians and associated peoples on the Silk Road, see "The Eastern end of the Silk Road in Silla", also here.

Selected readings

• "Turco-Sogdian horses and languages" (10/28/24)
• "Tocharo-Sinica and Sogdo-Sinica" (7/3/24)
• "Tocharo-Sinica" (5/13/24)
• "Catalogue of Sogdian Writings in Central Asia" (1/5/23)
• "Sogdians and Xiongnu / Huns" (2/21/22)
• "The sound of ancient Iranian languages" (10/26/23)
• Victor H. Mair, ed., The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man Inc. in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 1998).  2 vols.
• J. P. Mallory and Victor H.Mair,The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West(London:  Thames & Hudson, 2000).
• Elizabeth Wayland Barber, The Mummies of Ürümchi (New York:  W. W. Norton, 1999)

May 22, 2025 @ 12:04 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and business, Language and ethnicity, Language and history

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