Sogdia

Sogdia () or Sogdiana was an ancient Iranian civilisation located between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya rivers, in what is now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Sogdiana was also a province of the Achaemenid Empire, and is listed on the Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great. Sogdiana was first conquered by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and was later annexed by the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great in 328 BC. It would subsequently change hands under the Seleucid Empire, the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, the Kushan Empire, the Sasanian Empire, the Hephthalite Empire, the Western Turkic Khaganate, and following the Muslim conquest of Transoxiana. The Sogdian city-states, although never politically united, were centred on the city of Samarkand. Sogdian, an Eastern Iranian language, is no longer spoken. However, a descendant of one of its dialects—Yaghnobi—is still spoken by the Yaghnobis of Tajikistan. Sogdian was widely spoken in Central Asia as a lingua franca and served as one of the court languages of the First Turkic Khaganate for writing documents. Sogdians also lived in Imperial China and rose to prominence in the military and government of the Chinese Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). Sogdian merchants and diplomats travelled as far west as the Byzantine Empire. They played an essential role as middlemen in the Silk Road trade route. While initially practising the faiths of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Buddhism, and, to a lesser extent, the Church of the East from West Asia, the gradual conversion to Islam among the Sogdians and their descendants began with the Muslim conquest of Transoxiana in the 8th century. The Sogdian conversion to Islam was virtually complete by the end of the Samanid Empire in 999, coinciding with the decline of the Sogdian language, which was largely supplanted by New Persian.