The Many Ways of Being Human

3.9

The Silk Road

In a collapsed watchtower west of Dunhuang, Aurel Stein found in 1907 a sack of letters that were never delivered, among them one from a woman named Miwnay, stranded with her daughter and reproaching her husband. The letters are in Sogdian, the language of merchants from Samarkand and Bukhara, whose network spanned Asia and was gone within two generations.