The ancient city of Dandan-Uiliq, abandoned centuries ago, is located in the Xinjiang region, where Communist China is currently carrying out one of its most brutal campaigns of persecution. Once the city was an important stop along the Silk Road. In 1901, an excavation of the ruins of a Buddhist monastery there revealed an ancient letter written in Hebrew script. At the time of its writing, Persian-speaking Jewish merchants were involved in trade across Eurasia, from southwestern Russia to the Chinese heartland. Ursula Sims-Williams explains how another recent discovery helped make sense of the document:

The document was provisionally dated to the end of the 8th century CE, when the site was abandoned, and this dating was confirmed by [modern scientific] analysis. . . . The letter proved to be written in Judeo-Persian, i.e. Persian written in Hebrew script. However since the beginning and end of each line was missing, there was only a limited amount of contextual information to be deduced. Mention of sheep trading and cloth indicates the document’s commercial nature and a reference to the author having written “more than twenty letters” attests perhaps to a thriving trade. There is also an intriguing request for a harp required for instructing a girl how to play.

In 2004, however, an almost intact leaf of a similar document was acquired by the National Library of China [that] appears to be the initial page of possibly the same letter. . . . The letter is from a Persian-speaking Jew of Khotan . . . on the subject of sheep trading. It lists bribes to officials [that] include a vase, scent, silk cloth, raw silk, sugar, and other items not yet fully understood. Perhaps the most important information was the news from [the nearby city of] Kashgar that “they killed and captured all the Tibetans.” The writer himself contributed “a sum worth 100 strings of coins, or 100,000 coins” for the war effort.

Taking both parts together the Dandan-Uiliq letter is probably the oldest surviving document of substance to be written in early New Persian, marking the first phase of the Persian language after the Islamic conquest.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].