Saka: Encyclopedia II - Saka - Connection theories

Saka - Connection theories

The following sections deal mostly with popular traditions of Saka descent found among numerous Asian and European peoples. The Saka/Scythians are considered by mainstream historians and linguists as being Indo-Europeans who spoke a language in the Northern branch of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian also Aryan family of the Indo-European languages. The two surviving modern languages closest to Scythian are Ossetian in the Caucausus mountains and Pashto in Afganistan and Pakistan.

The Northern Iranian Aryan speakers including the Saka/Scythians were slowly overwhelmed by the Mongol-Turkic expansion in Central Asia beginning in the 4th century AD. Despite significant deaths in the invasions and further loss of population as survivors moved to other areas, Saka/Scythians and other ethnic groups formerly speaking the Northern Iranian language groups today form an ethnic substratum of contemporary Central Asian Turkic peoples, including the Kazakhs.

Saka - Asian peoples

Among others, modern Kazakhs (especially the branch known as "Saks") claim descent from the Sakas. The Sakha people of Siberia (see Yakuts) also claim descent from a remnant of the earlier Saka people. Additionally, although the evidence is dated and the technology utilized still in its infancy, DNA analysis conducted at the Novosibirsk Institute of Cytology and Genetics has found Kazakhs and Altai people to be the nearest relatives among competing Mongol-Turkic clans of a Scythian from the Pazyryk burial in Siberia.

The most notable Saka burial to date, whose occupant is referred to as the "Golden Man", was found in Kazakhstan. The silver dish found with the "Golden Man" is of a type common to other Germanic finds and is inscribed with a form of runic writing related to that found in Germanic and Scandinavian runic writing. However full knowledge of Germanic and Scandinavian runic writing is still not complete and combined with the likelihood of linguistic distance between Indo-European and Indo-Iranian, the language and content of the "Golden Man" dish have not yet been satisfactorily deciphered.

Archeological evidence and histographies shows a worldview of Sakas, similar to that of ancient German and Scandinavian traditions and closely related to that of present-day Kazakhs and Mongols. It is theorized that they believed Man was a part of the Universe, Cosmos, Heaven, Sun, mountains, river, in total nature, and shows close affinities with Shamanism and Tengriism which are still practiced today, from Kazakhstan to Siberia which conceive of God as related to Cosmic laws and forces. However, modern Kazakhs are Muslim, most modern Mongols are Buddhists, and Siberian shamanism is not known to be directly connected to Indo-European religion.

It has been further claimed that Saka (or Scythian) animal-stylized art closely resembles Sumerian art, and that the contemporary Kazakh language has about 500 words in common with the Sumerian language. This is one of a number of claims about the Sumerian language not recognized by mainstream scholars.

Main article: Shalivahana era

The Sakas were also one of several tribes that conquered India from the northwest, where they established the rule of the Indo-Scythians. The Saka Era is used by the Indian national calendar, a few other Hindu calendars, and the Cambodian Buddhist calendar—its year zero begins near the vernal equinox of 78. See Kushan Empire article for more complex description of Kushan-Scythian dating. Interestingly, the very name of "Cambodia" has been traced to a branch of Indo-Iranian Saka -- the Kambojas, who in turn evidently took their name from the Persian Cambyses. The modern Khmer people of Cambodia are, of course, non-Indo-Iranian in language.

There has been no strong genetic link discovered between the Kazakhs and peoples of India; however, the marker R1a1 accounts for more than 50% of Altai, Slavic and NW Indian/Pakistani males.

It is likely that by about 600 BC, Central Asia was occupied by a number of ethnic groups, all nomadic equestrians sharing simple cultural traits.

Saka - European peoples

Some researchers have argued that both the Celtic and Germanic people came from an area southeast of the Black Sea and migrated westward to the coast of Europe, starting with the reign of the Persian king Cyrus the Great when they declined to help him in his conquest of the Babylonian empire. Herodotus (440 BC) mentions a division of Persians known as Germanioi (Hist. 1.125). However, this is probably an imprecise rendering of the name Kerman (later Greek sources have Karmanioi), and it has nothing to do with the Latin name of the Germanic people.

The adherents of the Saka theory point out that the burial customs of the Scythians and the Vikings show certain similarities. Furthermore, the Old English chroniclers write that when the Saxons invaded England ca. 400 AD together with the Angli, they "sent back to Scythia for reinforcements". The implication is that the Saxons considered themselves to be Scythians -- the name having traveled with them even though they were far away from the region the Greeks had labelled "Scythia". However, the chroniclers have most probably taken over the name Scythia and its somewhat imprecise usage from the Latin literature; Scythia was identified with Sweden because of a superficial similarity of the two names (due to the fact that Scythia was pronounced [sitia] in Medieval Latin).

According to some traditions, the Saka race, with an affiliated tribe under a different name, migrated to the area of the Baltic Sea, and supposedly gave rise to the Saxon tribe in the area of present day Germany. This claim was cited in favour of Nazi claims that Germans were "original descendants of the Aryan race". However, contemporary philologists have rejected this notion, questioning the archaeological evidence for major cultural contacts between anyone in Uzbekistan or Iran, and the Baltic area. Nevertheless, many Germans believe that there was a connection between people in Central Asia and their own ancestors who were migrants from the East.

Paul Pezon supports this theory, claiming that the Saka Scythians and the seemingly related Cimmerians were ultimately ancestors to the Celts and Germans, and that the Germans fled the Baltic area when it was flooded by the rising sea level after the Ice age. He believes that the German tribe Cimbri have descended from a branch of the Cimmerians.

It must emphasised that most philologists studying the Germanic languages disagree with this hypothesis. There is a distant relationship between the Iranic Saka and the Germanic people due to the fact that both speak Indo-European languages. Their common forefathers, or better: the people speaking the proto-language which gave rise to Germanic and Iranian probably lived somewhere near the Black Sea. However, the two languages have nothing in common in addition to their common origin, and therefore the contact between them must have terminated at an early stage.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Connection theories", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki