Sogdiana

[sog-dee-ey-nuh, -an-uh]

noun

1. a province of the ancient Persian Empire between the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers: now in Uzbekistan. Samarkand.

Sogdiana

/ ˌsɒɡdɪˈɑːnə /

noun

1. a region of ancient central Asia. Its chief city was Samarkand

Example Sentences

It had once comprised Sogdiana and parts of Transoxania; it had been a point of confluence between Iran and Turan, the line between Persianate and Turkic cultures; the famous regions of Khorasan and Khwarezm were all part of what the land had known.

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In the 4th century, Alexander the Great defeated the Achaemenids and invaded Sogdiana, taking the Sogdian princess Roxana as his bride.

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For centuries, that isolation allowed the Yaghnobi to preserve a culture with roots in ancient Sogdiana, a province of the 6th century B.C.

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From the Greek invasion until the 8th-cenutry Arab conquest, Sogdiana was passed from empire to empire, a remote province of the Greco-Bactrian, Kushan, and Sasanian empires.

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According to the Avesta, the primary collection of sacred texts for the Zoroastrian faith practiced under the Achaemenid Emperor Cyrus the Great, Sogdiana was the second-finest land made by the deity Ahura Mazda, preceded only by Iran-Vej, likely in the eastern part of modern Iran, where the prophet Zoroaster himself was born.

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