Saka
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- For information on the town in Hiroshima, Japan, see Saka, Hiroshima.
The Sakas or Saka race was a group of people who lived in present day Uzbekistan around 2000 BC. The Sakas followed other Aryans into present day Iran, and returned to their original area in Central Asia.
According to some, this Saka race, with an affiliated tribe under a different name, then emigrated to northern Europe, into the area of the Baltic Sea (Sakas are considered a branch of Scythians by most scholars). Supposedly, this Saka race, and especially their affiliated tribe, whose name they correlate to the word Saxon, gave rise to the Saxons 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". Most contemporary philologists have rejected this notion, questioning the archaeological evidences for major cultural contacts between anyone in Uzbekistan or Iran, and the Baltic area. Neverthless, many Germans believe that there was a connection between the people in the central Asia region and their German ancestors who were migrants from the East. (In contrast, French ethnologist Monsieur H. Hubert has proposed that blond-haired people came from the Atlas mountains of Morocco.)
On the other hand, Paul Perzon ardently supports the previous theory, claiming that Sakas were the ancestors of the Scythians, Cimmerians/Gomers and ultimately Celts (and claiming further that Celts and Germans were originally the same nation, and that Germans fled the Baltic area when it was flooded by the rising sea level after the Ice age - since the German tribe Cimbri are thought to be descended from a branch of the Cimmerians).
In Babylonian Akkadian, the Saka were called the Gimirri; in the Assyrian dialect of Akkadian, they were referred to as the Khumri or Bit-Khumri, who were the Cimmerians known to the Greeks and Romans.
In other Babylonian and Assyrian monuments and tablets the conquests of the Khumri and their eventual captivity were chronicled. The Khumri were also called the Bit-omri or the House of Omri - one of the kings of the northern tribes of the kingdom of Israel.
Some researchers have argued that both the Celts and the Germans came from an area south-east of the Black Sea, and migrated westward to the coast of Europe. According to that hypothesis, the Saka-Scythians migrated westward, 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 says they were called "Germanii" at that point in time. The Greeks called the Scythians Sakae and Scyths.
When the Saxons invaded England in 400 AD, their chroniclers said they "sent back to Scythia for reinforcements." The implication is that the Saxons considered themselves to be Scythians, the name having travelled with them even though they were far away from the region the Greeks had labelled "Scythia". The English are known to be descended from the Anglo-Saxons. The burial customs of the Scythians and Vikings also show similarities, wherefore some have argued a common origin in support of the theory.
The Sakas or Shakyas were also one of several tribes that conquered India from the northwest, where they established the rule of the Indo-Scythians. The Indian National Calendar starts from the first year of the Saka Era, 78 CE.
Genetics: About 50% of Slavs and Balts, and about 30% of Central Europeans share the same Y chromosome (R1a) with 50% of the people of the Indus Valley. [1] (http://www.livius.org/sao-sd/scythians/scythians.html),[2] (http://evolutsioon.ut.ee/publications/Kivisild2003b.pdf),[3] (http://www.oxfordancestors.com/papers/mtDNA03%20GeneticHeritage.pdf) [4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jat_%28people%29)
References
- Bailey, H. W. 1958. "Languages of the Saka." Handbuch der Orientalistik, I. Abt., 4. Bd., I. Absch., Leiden-Köln. 1958.
- Davis-Kimball, Jeannine. 2002. Warrior Women: An Archaeologist's Search for History's Hidden Heroines. Warner Books, New York. 1st Trade printing, 2003. ISBN 0-446-67983-6 (pbk).
- P’iankov, I. V. 1994. "The Ethnic History of the Sakas." Bulletin of the Asia Institute: The Archaeology and Art of Central Asia. Studies From the Former Soviet Union. New Series. Edited by B. A. Litvinskii and Carol Altman Bromberg. Translation directed by Mary Fleming Zirin. Vol. 8, (1994), pp. 37-46.[5] (http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/History/prehistory/saka.htm)
- Pulleyblank, Edwin G. 1970. "The Wu-sun and Sakas and the Yüeh-chih Migration." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 33 (1970), pp. 154-160.
- Puri, B. N. 1994. "The Sakas and Indo-Parthians." In: History of civilizations of Central Asia, Volume II. The development of sedentary and nomadic civilizations: 700 B.C. to A.D. 250. Harmatta, János, ed., 1994. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, pp. 191-207.
- Thomas, F. W. 1906. "Sakastana." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1906), pp. 181-216.
- Yu, Taishan. 1998. A Study of Saka History. Sino-Platonic Papers No. 80. July, 1998. Dept. of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
- Yu, Taishan. 2000. A Hypothesis about the Source of the Sai Tribes. Sino-Platonic Papers No. 106. September, 2000. Dept. of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania.