Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (79 page)

Sai ~ *Sak ~ Saka ~ śaka ~ Sogdians ~ Scythians ‘The Archers’

The name
(later
) ‘Scyth(ian)’ must be reconstructed as North Iranian *Skuδa, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *Skuda, from Proto-Indo-European *skud-o from *skeud-o- ‘shooter, archer’, as shown by Szemerényi.
⁹
In Herodotus’s account of the Scythians’ legendary origins (for which see the prologue) the text has two variants for the name of the third son, the ancestor of the later Scythians. One is
Coláxaïs,
a textual error for
as noted by Abicht (who, however, corrects the text differently).
¹⁰
Legrand,
¹¹
who does not cite Abicht, is puzzled by the text in this version of the myth, because the Scythians are said to call themselves
‘Scoloti’ after their king’s name—the previously mentioned Koλάξαïç
Coláxaïs
(i.e., *Σאoλάξαïç *Skoláxaïs). Scoloti is simply a later form of the name Σאύλαç Scythês, earlier transcribed by Hesiod (ca. 700
BC
) as Σאύλŋç Scythas.
¹²
This is, as demonstrated by Szemerényi, the same name as
swγδa ~ s
γ
wδa
‘Sugda ~ Sguda’ (with epenthesis in Old Persian as *Suguda), the name of Sogdiana and the Sogdians. In addition, Herodotus says that the Persians call the Scythians
Saka,
a fact confirmed by the Old Persian inscriptions. The name of the best-known Northern Iranian people in Chinese sources, the Sai
NMan
sâi
from MChi *saik from *sak ‘Saka’, shows the usual dropping of the final short-a vowel in Indo-Iranian names. It typically lacks the
-l-
from
-δ-
found in the other names. But the same name also appears in other forms in early transcriptions, including the name of the Saka city So-chü
NMan
suôjû
*Saγlâ ‘Yarkand’
¹³
and So-li
*Saklai, the name of the ancestral northern nation from which the Puyo-Koguryoic people stemmed, according to their origin myth,
¹⁴
both evidently from *Sakla. This name is clearly related to *Skula, the form of the name ‘Scythian’ attested in Herodotus and shown by Szemerényi to be one of the regular later phonetic developments of the name within Northern Iranian.
¹⁵
Like *Skula, the velar in Sakla is unvoiced and the *d has become l,
¹⁶
but in this case, like *Sugda ‘Sogd’, an epenthetic vowel has been inserted between the consonants of the original initial cluster *sk. Unlike *Sugda ‘Sogd’, another regular development of the same name (but one in which the velar has been voiced and the dental has not yet shifted to l), the epenthetic vowel in this case was obviously a, not u. The consonantism of *Sakla is thus the same as that of the name of the Scythian ruler Σxύληϧ
Skul
γ
s,
the root of which, *Skula, is in turn identical to the root *Skula of the name Σxύoηóται
Scolótai,
given by Herodotus as the Scythians’ own name for themselves.
¹⁷
The Persian form
Skudra
discussed by Szemerényi
¹⁸
is yet another form of the same name *Skuδa. Unfortunately, he follows the old idea (probably a folk etymology) that Saka is a Persian name for the Scythians derived from the Persian verb sak- ‘to go, flow, run’, and therefore supposedly could mean ‘roamer, wanderer, vagrant nomad’.
¹⁹
However, his conclusion regarding the name
Skudra
states that it is “a derivative of
Skuδa,
name of the Scythians.”
²⁰
This means that because Old Persian actually preserves the earlier form *Skuδa in this local name, the usual Persian name of the Scythians changed at some point from *Skuδa- to
Saka.
Rather than being a completely new word, as Szemerényi argues, in view of the form *Saγla ~ *Saklai it seems clear that the name
Saka,
which as the sources say is the “Persian” name for
all
Scythians,
²¹
is a form of the very same ethnonym, *Skuδa, via the known intermediate form *Skula. The change evidently took place via insertion of the epenthetic vowel
a
to break up the initial cluster
sk
, as in other cases. The foreign (non-Persian) name *Sakula thus became
Saka
in Persian, probably via an intermediary *Sakla, or perhaps *Sak(u)δa ~ *Sak(u)ra.
²²
It is significant that the Saka people are equated explicitly with the
Scythians
(who are equated explicitly with the *Skula) by all sources. While the existence of the verb
sak-
‘to go, roam’ might well have aided or even motivated the development of the name
Saka
within Persian, it clearly cannot be
in origin
a Persian descriptive word referring to the habits of the people in question. The name is a specific ethnonym, not a generic term, in both Greek and Persian sources, and is of course the name of a foreign people, not a Persian people. The preservation of the earlier form *Sakla in the extreme eastern dialects supports the historicity of the conquest of the entire steppe zone by the Northern Iranians—literally, by the ‘Scythians’—in the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age, as shown by archaeology and discussed in
chapter 2
, where various peoples, several of them historical, named
Saka
(usually transcribed *Sak) are attested in Chinese sources from Antiquity through the Early Middle Ages in the northern part of the entire Eastern Steppe zone as well as more to the south in Jungharia and the Tarim Basin. As Szemerényi remarks, “at first all North Iranian tribes of the steppe region had one common indigenous name, i.e.
Skuδa
‘archer’.”
²³
The Chinese transcriptions appear to reflect the period after the shift of OChi *s to MChi *Χ and the restoration of *s by the shift of OChi *ś [ς] to MChi s.
²⁴

Yüeh-chih ~ *Tok
^w
ar /*Tog
^w
ar ‘The Tokharians’

The name Tokharian (or Tocharian) current in English and other European languages has been much discussed. Among philologists specializing in early Central Eurasia and China a consensus on the main issues was reached long ago, despite some unresolved problems. However, due to the nature of the sources—mainly Chinese historical and geographical texts, in which the names must be interpreted via Chinese historical phonology, an extremely arcane field—research on the topic remains a highly contentious subject that is largely opaque to scholars unfamiliar with Chinese philology and phonology. As a result, there is more confusion about the name or names of the Tokharians than about any other name in premodern Central Eurasian history.