Though several Sogdian cities have been excavated, much of what scholars know about Sogdiana is based on documents and artifacts recovered from towns along the Silk Road and in China. The excavations in Panjakent, now under the supervision of archaeologist and philologist Pavel Lurje of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, offer a vivid glimpse of what the Sogdians were like in their homeland. In particular, dramatic murals depicting myths, fables, and everyday scenes characterize the world of the Sogdian imagination.

“We find murals in almost every field season,” says Lurje. “It’s one of the reasons archaeologists have worked at the site for so many years.” Aleksandr Naymark, an archaeologist at Hofstra University who excavated at the site in the 1980s, says that the analogy of Sogdian merchants to Renaissance Italians is especially fitting given the dizzying array of murals that have been unearthed at Panjakent. “In northern Italy during the Renaissance you had this merchant class whose extreme wealth led to an exceptionally creative period, especially in narrative art,” says Naymark. “The Sogdian merchants enabled the same kind of burst of creativity, which you see in these murals.”

....