Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A member of an ancient Iranian people whose homeland was in the area around Samarkand and who had established settlements throughout Chinese Turkistan before the advent of Islam.
- noun The extinct Middle Iranian language of this people, known chiefly from texts and inscriptions dating from the second to the ninth centuries AD.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective of or relating to
Sogdiana - proper noun An
extinct Middle Iranian language spoken aroundSogdiana . - noun A native of
Sogdiana
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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The first and most heavily fortified was a stronghold known as the Sogdian Rock on top of a mountain hundreds of feet high surrounded on all sides by precipitous cliffs.
Alexander the Great Philip Freeman 2011
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The first and most heavily fortified was a stronghold known as the Sogdian Rock on top of a mountain hundreds of feet high surrounded on all sides by precipitous cliffs.
Alexander the Great Philip Freeman 2011
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The first and most heavily fortified was a stronghold known as the Sogdian Rock on top of a mountain hundreds of feet high surrounded on all sides by precipitous cliffs.
Alexander the Great Philip Freeman 2011
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With the troops under his own command he marched against the fortress called the Sogdian Rock, seated on an isolated hill, so precipitous as to be deemed inaccessible, and so well supplied with provisions as to defy a blockade.
A Smaller history of Greece From the earliest times to the Roman conquest William Smith 1853
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Some, including Avestan, the language of the Zoroastrians and their sacred religious texts, and Sogdian, which gained wide use as a lingua franca among merchants and traders along the ancient Silk Route, are extinct.
The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010
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Some, including Avestan, the language of the Zoroastrians and their sacred religious texts, and Sogdian, which gained wide use as a lingua franca among merchants and traders along the ancient Silk Route, are extinct.
The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010
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By this point the Sogdian leader and his officers had fled, so the Macedonian captain left most of his troops encircling the area and entered the town with only a handful of men.
Alexander the Great Philip Freeman 2011
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This immoderate love took the form of dragging her through the steppes and over mountains with him on his raids, whereas most Sogdian commanders would have left their wives at home.
Alexander the Great Philip Freeman 2011
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Once again he was no closer to a solution of the Sogdian situation than he had been the previous autumn.
Alexander the Great Philip Freeman 2011
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He speculates that communities of Sogdian traders might have adapted rituals and costumes to caravan life.
A Mysterious Stranger in China Lee Lawrence 2011
chained_bear commented on the word Sogdian
historical note in comment on picul and on Turco-Sogdian. Also, following:
"The eight Sogdian-language letters found by Stein are largely intact. ... the workmen showed him what they had discovered: some colored silks, a wooden case, Chinese documents dating to the early first century CE, a piece of silk with Kharoshthi script on it from before 400 CE, and 'one small roll after another of neatly folded paper containing what was manifestly some Western writing.' The script resembled Aramaic ... Only later was the unfamiliar script identified as Sogdian...."
--Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 116-117
--Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 143-144
December 30, 2016