While the early years of the 20th century saw a massive boom in the number of Middle Iranian sources available to the world, the Chorasmian language remained almost unknown to modern scholars. That an Iranian language particular to the region had existed, of course, was no surprise: the polymath al-Biruni cited a few Chorasmian terms in some of his works, and al-Biruni’s works had been the subject of major European scholarly publications since the 1870s. But no Chorasmian sources were discovered at Silk Road sites such as Turfan, for example, which yielded such riches in Sogdian, Parthian, Middle Persian, and Khotanese. So, no actual sources in Chorasmian were known to that first modern generation of specialists in Middle Iranian.

The fact that original Chorasmian texts are now available to scholars, and have been studied since the mid-20th century, is due entirely to the efforts of one person: the Bashkir revolutionary and Turkologist Ahmed Zeki Validi Togan (1890-1970).