People
Bariani
Barriana
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The Bariani are a people placed on the map among the Asian lands east of the Sea of Azov and north of the Taurus mountains. A list of places compiled in Ravenna knows them as Barriana, a province of Greater Media. Scholars have argued that the name is garbled and should read Bactriani, the Bactrians, whose country stretched along both banks of the upper Oxos, the river now called Amu Darya, roughly in modern Afghanistan. Greek writers praised that land's fertility: the botanist Theophrastus claimed its ripe grains grew as large as olive stones.