Saka

Saka is what the Persians called the Iranian nomads of Central and Inner Asia. Herodotus says so: the eastern groupings of the people the Greeks called Scythians were Saka to the Persians, Śaka in Sanskrit and Sai in the Chinese records.^[1] The name is therefore a view from a settled state, like almost every name in the sources for the steppe. It covers a great many tribes that need not have called themselves anything in common.

One etymology derives the name from Iranian sak-, “to go, flow, run”. That gives “running, swift, vagrant” and so “nomad”.^[2] A name that means “the moving people” is a common enough kind of name on this steppe. The derivation is one proposal among several, however, and has been rejected.^[2]

Extent

The Saka were not confined to the Central Asian steppe. They stretched from the Pontic zone to the Altai and eastern Turkestan. A Han-period Chinese notice on that country says that many different languages are spoken there but that they are in general the same and the people understand each other clearly.^[2] Some of them settled. The oasis city-states of southern Central Asia grew out of such groups: Khwarazm and Sogdiana in the west and the Khotanese Saka settlements in Chinese Turkestan. Others took Bactria.^[2]

The Achaemenid inscriptions distinguish the kinds of Saka by epithet. The list is the closest thing to a contemporary census of them. It names the sakā tigraxaudā, “Saka with pointed caps”, in Kazakhstan, perhaps north of the Syr Darya, whom some connect with the Massagetae. It names the sakā haumavargā, “Saka who prepare haoma”, seemingly in the Murghab region. It names the sakā tyaiy para sugdam, “Saka beyond Sogdia”. It also names the sakā tyaiy paradraya, “Saka beyond the sea”, which may mean beyond the Aral or in the Pontic zone.^[2] Neighbouring them were the Dahā east of the Caspian, the Issedones probably beside them in eastern Kazakhstan, and the Arimaspi further east.^[3]

Saka and Achaemenid

Khwarazm, Sogdia, Bactria and some of the Saka groupings came under Achaemenid rule. How much Cyrus took is uncertain. By some accounts he died in 530 BC on campaign in Central Asia, and parts of the country may have submitted to the Medes before him.^[3] By the reign of Darius I, from 522 to 486 BC, Herat, Khwarazm, Sogdia and the frequently troublesome Saka stood among the satrapies of his realm.^[3]

At some point, probably in the first centuries BC, Saka entered Iran proper and settled the region the Old Persian inscriptions call Zranka. The region became Sakastan, and is Sistan today. This was a nomadic movement that left its name on a province, in answer to migrations far to the east.^[2]

Bearing on the Göktürks

Two things tie the Saka to the history of the Göktürks. The first is territorial. Tribes of the Scytho-Saka cultural world, presumably Iranian-speaking, were in the Altai, and the much-discussed Pazyryk burials belong to it. That is the same country in which the Göktürks appear a thousand years later. Whoever came after inherited what was made there.^[2] It has been suggested that the Turkic peoples of South Siberia took equestrian pastoral nomadism from the Saka with pointed caps. It remains a suggestion.^[2]

The second is the direction of absorption. The Iranian nomads led the culture of the steppe for a thousand years. Elements of them, the Sogdians above all, were later taken into the Turkic world rather than the other way about.^[4] What that does and does not license is argued in the debate over Turkic origins.

A third tie is writing. A silver cup from the Issyk kurgan near Almaty, a burial of the Saka age, bears an inscription. Some scholars see in its signs an early runiform writing that passed from the Saka through the Huns to the Göktürks.^[5] Others see in them the script of Iranian-speaking nomads.^[6]

References

^ Golden 1992, p. 46
^ a b c d e f g h Golden 1992, p. 47
^ a b c Golden 1992, p. 48
^ Golden 1992
^ Durmuş 2000, p. 188
^ Guzev 1993, p. 32

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
İlhami Durmuş, Köl Tigin Külliyesi Kalıntıları ve Türk Kültür Çevresindeki Yeri (2000)
Viktor G. Guzev; Sergey G. Klyaştornıy, Genel Yazı Nazariyesi Işığında Göktürk Yazısının Menşei Meselesi (Okunuşunun 100. Yıl Dönümü Dolayısıyla) (1993)