the German Turfan expeditions. These expeditions were controlled by the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. These pieces consist almost entirely of religious works by Manichaean and Christian writers, including translations of the Bible. Most of the Sogdian religious works are from the 9th and 10th centuries. Dunhuang and Turfan were the two most plentiful sites of Manichean, Buddhist, and Christian Sogdian texts. Sogdiana itself actually contained a much smaller collection of texts. These texts were business related, belonging to a minor Sogdian king, Divashtich. These business texts dated back to the time of the Muslim conquest, about 700. Writing system Like all the writing systems employed for Middle Iranian languages, the Sogdian alphabet ultimately derives from the Aramaic alphabet. Like its close relatives, the Pahlavi scripts, written Sogdian contains many logograms or ideograms, which were Aramaic words written to represent native spoken ones. The Sogdian script is the direct ancestor of the Old Uyghur alphabet, itself the forerunner of the Traditional Mongolian alphabet. As in other writing systems descended from the Proto-Sinaitic script, there are no special signs for vowels. As in the parent Aramaic system, the consonantal signs ’ y w can be used as matres lectionis for the long vowels [a: i: u:] respectively. However, unlike it, these consonant signs would also sometimes serve to express the short vowels (which could also sometimes be left unexpressed, as they always are in the parent systems). To distinguish long vowels from short ones, an additional aleph could be written before the sign denoting the long vowel. The Sogdian language also used the Manichaean alphabet, which consisted of 29 letters. In transcribing Sogdian script into Roman letters, Aramaic ideograms are often noted by means of capitals. Morphology Nouns Light stems Heavy stems Contracted stems Verbs Present indicative Imperfect indicative References Further reading Bo, Bi, and Nicholas Sims-Williams. "The Epitaph of a Buddhist Lady: A Newly Discovered Chinese-Sogdian Bilingual". In: Journal of the American Oriental Society 140, no. 4 (2020): 803–20. doi:10.7817/jameroriesoci.140.4.0803. External links Iranian Language Family Introduction to Manichaean Sogdian by P. Oktor Skjærvø Introduction to Manichaean Sogdian (Introduction only) Introduction to Manichaean Sogdian (full text) Sogdian Dictionary Languages attested from the 4th century Extinct languages of Asia Eastern Iranian languages Lingua francas