Hello and welcome to Silk, Salt and Saddlebags. I am Selin Aydin, and in this series we follow the old trade roads one stop at a time, with the merchants' own words wherever they survive. We begin in the middle of the Silk Road, with a people most listeners have never heard of. The Sogdians of Samarkand and Bukhara never had an empire, never had an army worth the name, and for five hundred years their language was the language of business from the Chinese capital to the Persian border. In 1907 a bundle of their letters was found in a ruined watchtower near Dunhuang, undelivered for sixteen centuries. One is from a woman called Miwnay, abandoned by her merchant husband, and it is heartbreaking. We read it, and then we follow the money. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.