The Sogdian Web: Caravan Agents of the Silk Road

Trade Routes That Changed Human History Forever — Fexingo History · Jul 14, 2026 · 5m · transcript

Before the Mongols and the great empires, the Silk Road was run by a network of Sogdian merchants from Samarkand and Bukhara. These middlemen spoke dozens of languages, financed caravans, and even manipulated empires. In this episode, Lucas and Luna trace the rise of the Sogdian trading networks—from their Zoroastrian homeland in Transoxiana to the Sogdian Ancient Letters found in a watchtower near Dunhuang. They explore how Sogdian agents like Nanai-vandak managed long-distance trade, how the Sogdian script became the basis for the Uyghur and later Mongolian alphabets, and how the Sogdian…