18 Facts About Saka

Some other Saka groups lived to the east of the Pamir Mountains and to the north of the Iaxartes river, as well as in the regions corresponding to modern-day Qirghizia, Tian Shan, Altai, Tuva, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Kazakhstan.

Saka are attested in historical and archaeological records dating to around the 8th century BC.

Possibly shortly before the 520s BC, the Saka expanded into the valleys of the Ili and Chu in eastern Central Asia.

The territories of the Saka were absorbed into the Achaemenid Empire as part of Chorasmia that included much of the territory between the Oxus and the Iaxartes rivers, and the Saka then supplied the Achaemenid army with large number of mounted bowmen.

Saka were pushed out of the Ili and Chu River valleys by the Yuezhi.

Related searches

The Saka moved southwards toward the Pamirs and northern India, where they settled in Kashmir, and eastward, to settle in some of the oasis-states of Tarim Basin sites, like Yanqi and Qiuci .

Similar documents in the Khotanese-Saka language dating mostly to the 10th century have been found in the Dunhuang manuscripts.

Attestations of the Saka language show that it was an Eastern Iranian language.

The linguistic heartland of Saka was the Kingdom of Khotan, which had two varieties, corresponding to the major settlements at Khotan and Tumshuq .

Tumshuqese and Khotanese varieties of Saka contain many borrowings from the Middle Indo-Aryan languages, but share features with the modern Eastern Iranian languages Wakhi and Pashto.

Issyk inscription, a short fragment on a silver cup found in the Issyk kurgan in Kazakhstan is believed to be an early example of Saka, constituting one of very few autochthonous epigraphic traces of that language.

Saka heartland was gradually conquered during the Turkic expansion, beginning in the sixth century, and the area was gradually Turkified linguistically under the Uyghurs.

The samples of mtDNA extracted from the Tien Shan Saka belonged to C4, H4d, T2a1, U5a1d2b, H2a, U5a1a1, HV6, D4j8, W1c and G2a1.

The study suggested that the Saka were the source of west Eurasian ancestry among the Xiongnu, and that the Huns probably emerged through minor male-driven East Asian geneflow into the Saka through westward migrations by the Xiongnu.

Saka burials documented by modern archaeologists include the kurgans at Pazyryk in the Ulagan district of the Altai Republic, south of Novosibirsk in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia .

Art of the Saka was of a similar styles as other Iranian peoples of the steppes, which is referred to collectively as Scythian art.

Saka influences have been identified as far as Korea and Japan.

Some Pazyryk culture Saka wore short belted tunic with a lapel on the right side, with upright collar, 'puffed' sleeves narrowing at the wrist and bound in narrow cuffs of a color different from the rest of the tunic.