Of course the first thing that I think when I read these letters is the very different way that they spoke to each other than we do. Of course there is a language barrier, but I believe that it is more than that. Particularly in the letters written to wives and husbands, a lot can be said for the sense of real desperation and dread of being both away from their spouses and stuck in a foreign land. Obviously this speaks volumes about how this particular group of people saw both far-flung areas on the Silk Road and gender roles in society.
Although it is never easy being alone in a strange land with strange customs and a language barrier, as far as I can tell the Sogdians as a people ruled the Silk Road and administered it; therefore I have a hard time believing that the average Sogdian would have this sense of real fear and distress when talking about a foreign land, even when this was only private conversations with their spouses. This was partially explained by the second letter, which is famous for proving the connection between the Xiongnu and the Huns of Eastern Europe. In fact during this period I have often heard in my study of, for example Russia, about the constant wave of barbarian attacks coming from the fields of central Asia, which makes it even more unbelievable that a realistic trade route could have been maintained.
What really interests me, however, is the political institutions of the Sogdians. They do seem to have local leaders as mentioned in the person of Varzdak, but it seems to me that they lived largely in city states, unconquered, at least at this point, by larger emperors. This shines a fascinating light on just how important the Silk Road was to their life. The fertile flat plains of Central Asia would have been ideal for the making of such empires, purely because they could be so easily conquered, as successive rulers like Tamerlane learned. However the political system in Sogdia was tailored specifically for the use of Silk Roads, suggesting that for the sake of profit they barely tried to unite what would have been already linguistically and culturally one nation, just to keep up profit. This is indeed a wealth-crazed society.
Of course since these documents deal so explicitly with women writing to their husbands, it would be pointless to leave out the valuable information that can be learned about social structure of gender relations. Once again we see a political parallel. I found it very telling that men use many of the same terms to refer to their political superiors as women refer to their men. Here clearly we have a fairly ordinary pre-modern assessment where, at least in title, the man was the head (although these must have been fairly wealthy women, their husbands presumably being fairly important traders and themselves having at least enough surplus income to hire a letter writer). One wonders then why these women seem so desperate for their husband’s return? Of course once again we can safely assume much of the flowery dialogue to be simply a result of the time, and of course it is quite possible that she simply misses her husband, or at the very least wants him to think so. Still, when someone tells their spouse that they imagine themselves dead without them its certainly worth looking into further. It is of course also possible that with her husband gone away for so long, she would have limited access to money for example, or possibly imagined the results of a possible widowhood, although once again emotionally crippling, this would have worked out very badly for her in that society. Since these documents seem so incredibly rare and so extremely valuable as some of the very few documents from this period of Sogdian history, we must of course rule nothing out.