History in the Making – The Sogdian Wine Question along the Silk Road: “To Drink, or Not to Drink?”

Wine on the Silk Road was something one shared with strangers, poured for the dead, remembered people by. I start with musallas, still brewed in Samarkand homes today, not because it proves some ancient lineage, but because it offers a foothold for larger questions. From there, Sogdiana: vineyards, the years of waiting they demanded, and cities wealthy enough to afford them. The evidence is uneven, ranging from wall paintings and pollen to potsherds, but together it shows wine marking religious ceremony, structuring hospitality, and sealing trust between insider and outsider. When Sogdians moved into Tang China, wine went with them, carrying skills and habits across Eurasia.

Nargis T. Nurulla-Khoja works at the intersection of intellectual history, decolonial thought, and the cultural memory of Central Asia and the Middle East. Her research follows the movement of ideas across the Silk Road: Sogdian social worlds, Sufi networks, and the passage of astronomical knowledge from Ulugh Beg to Copernicus by way of Arabic intermediaries. She is interested in how Central Asian and Middle Eastern societies have lived through and pushed back against imperial and colonial epistemologies. Her most recent books are Cultural Heritage in Tourism: Narrating the Cultural Heritage of Samarkand and Surrounding Regions (Samarkand: Silk Road International University Press, 2025) and Echoes of Chiaroscuro: Unspoken Stories of Light, co-authored with Farangis Nurulla-Khoja (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2025).

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