The Uzbek–Italian Excavations at Kojtepa (Samarkand Area) Uzbekistan: First results and work perspectives

Since 2008, the joint Uzbek–Italian archaeological activities of the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, Samarkand (IAASU), and the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale” (UNO) have been carried out in the Pastdargom district in the Samarkand area.¹ The scientific aims of these activities are to analyse the archaeological consistency during the 6th–4th century BCE of an area recorded for the first time in the trilingual inscription of Darius the Great (522–486 BCE) in Bisutun. There, the old Persian ethnonym or toponym “Sogd/Sugd” is explicitly used, phonetically and most probably lexically connected with the Greek–