Roshanak
Encyclopedia
Roshanak is a traditional Iranian
Iranian languages
The Iranian languages form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages which in turn is a subgroup of Indo-European language family. They have been and are spoken by Iranian peoples....

 name for a female. Its meaning is "luminous beauty".

This was the name of a Bactria
Bactria
Bactria and also appears in the Zend Avesta as Bukhdi. It is the ancient name of a historical region located between south of the Amu Darya and west of the Indus River...

n noblewoman who was the daughter of Oxyartes
Oxyartes
Oxyartes was a Bactrian, father of Roxana, the wife of Alexander of Macedon. He is first mentioned as one of the chiefs who accompanied Bessus on his retreat across the Oxus river into Sogdiana...

 of Sogdiana
Sogdiana
Sogdiana or Sogdia was the ancient civilization of an Iranian people and a province of the Achaemenid Empire, eighteenth in the list on the Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great . Sogdiana is "listed" as the second of the "good lands and countries" that Ahura Mazda created...

 (or Bactria
Bactria
Bactria and also appears in the Zend Avesta as Bukhdi. It is the ancient name of a historical region located between south of the Amu Darya and west of the Indus River...

) and the official wife of Alexander the Great, known as Roxana
Roxana
Roxana sometimes Roxane, was a Bactrian noble and a wife of Alexander the Great. She was born earlier than the year 343 BC, though the precise date remains uncertain....

 in Greek.

It is also the name of Dara's daughter (Dara is a character in Shahnama).

The names Roxanne
Roxanne
Roxanne may refer to:* Hurricane Roxanne, a major hurricane in October 1995* "Roxanne" , a 1978 song by The Police* A main character and love interest in Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac'...

 and Roxane are English and French variants of this name. Diminutives are Roxie and Roxy. For example, Roxane is the name of Cyrano's love in the famous French play Cyrano de Bergerac
Cyrano de Bergerac (play)
Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. Although there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, the play bears very scant resemblance to his life....

by Edmond Rostand
Edmond Rostand
Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism, and is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays provided an alternative to the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century...

.

In Spanish and Romanian, the form Roxana is used while Ruxandra is used in Romanian only. Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish have a similar name, though probably of different etymology. In Russian, the form Роксана (Roksana) is used; in Ukrainian and Polish, Roksolana.

There used to be an eastern iranian tribe called the Roxolani in eastern europe around present day Ukraine, Moldovia and Romania.

Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent of Turkey defied Ottoman tradition to free and marry his concubine Hurrem or Roxelana
Roxelana
Haseki Hürrem Sultan was the wife of Süleyman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire.-Names:Sixteenth-century sources are silent as to her maiden name, but much later traditions, for example Ukrainian folk traditions first recorded in the 19th century, give it as "Anastasia" , and Polish...

 as she was known in Europe.

This name is still popular and in common use in today's Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...

. The diminutive form Roshie is sometimes heard.
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