Graphemological Features of The Sogdian “Ancient Letters” Script

This article is devoted to the formal features of the letters and the archaeogrammatological analysis of the Sogdian letters known in scholarship as the “Ancient Letters”, discovered in the territory of Dunhuang (China) and dating to the first quarter of the 3rd century CE. In the study, the graphic forms of each letter are analyzed following their sequence in the alphabetic system. During the research, the letters were compared with their similar features in the Aramaic, Parthian, and Khwarazmian scripts. Where necessary, variants of letter combinations are also presented in the text in the form of tables. The article also provides information about the discovery of the “Ancient Letters”, their dating, and the scholars who studied these documents. The study consists of an introduction, the main research results, and a conclusion. In the conclusion, the authors suggest that the “Ancient Letters” were influenced by the lapidary tradition of Sogdian writing, which began in the 3rd–2nd centuries BCE (writing each letter in an independent form without connecting them in the text), and that they represent an example of the initial stage of cursivization in the history of Sogdian writing culture.

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