As some of you may know, there is a new Alexander movie coming out next month, and Rosario Dawson plays Roxanne….
Roxanne was a Sogdian princess whose father was king of Balkh (modern Mazar-i-Sharif). The Sogdians were an Indo-European people who spoke an Iranian language who dominated much of northern Afghanistan and the Ferghana Valley during ancient times. Their only modern linguistic descendents are the Yaghnobi people, who have been shown to have some genetic relationship to the peoples of Western Europe (see Spencer Wells’ Journey of Man1). So I’m not sure if she’s an accurate representation of what the ancient Roxanne looked like…but that’s OK, the real Alexander was a red-headed midget with little pegged teeth.
1 – Wells traces the lineages of the group of modern humans who pushed into Europe from the east, that is, Central Asia. The Sogdians were possibly descendents of this same group that drifted south, or at least stayed closer to the ancestral homeland.
Posted by razib at 02:00 AM