The Scythian languages
( or or ) are a group of
Eastern Iranian languages of the
classical and
late antique period (the
Middle Iranian period), spoken in a vast region of
Eurasia
Eurasia (, ) is the largest continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. Primarily in the Northern and Eastern Hemispheres, it spans from the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Japanese archipelag ...
by the populations belonging to the
Scythian cultures and their descendants. The dominant ethnic groups among the Scythian-speakers were
nomadic pastoralists of Central Asia and the
Pontic–Caspian steppe
The Pontic–Caspian steppe, formed by the Caspian steppe and the Pontic steppe, is the steppeland stretching from the northern shores of the Black Sea (the Pontus Euxinus of antiquity) to the northern area around the Caspian Sea. It extend ...
. Fragments of their speech known from inscriptions and words quoted in ancient authors as well as analysis of their names indicate that it was an
Indo-European language
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Du ...
, more specifically from the
Iranian
Iranian may refer to:
* Iran, a sovereign state
* Iranian peoples, the speakers of the Iranian languages. The term Iranic peoples is also used for this term to distinguish the pan ethnic term from Iranian, used for the people of Iran
* Iranian lan ...
group of
Indo-Iranian languages.
Most of the Scythian languages eventually became extinct, except for modern
Ossetian (which descends from the
Alanian dialect of Scytho-Sarmatian),
Wakhi (which descends from the
Khotanese and
Tumshuqese
Saka, or Sakan, was a variety of Eastern Iranian languages, attested from the ancient Buddhist kingdoms of Khotan, Kashgar and Tumshuq in the Tarim Basin, in what is now southern Xinjiang, China. It is a Middle Iranian language. The t ...
forms of
Scytho-Khotanese), and
Yaghnobi (which descends from
Sogdian).
Alexander Lubotsky summarizes the known linguistic landscape as follows:
Classification
The vast majority of Scythological scholars agree in considering the Scythian languages (and Ossetian) as a part of the
Eastern Iranian
The Eastern Iranian languages are a subgroup of the Iranian languages emerging in Middle Iranian times (from c. the 4th century BC). The Avestan language is often classified as early Eastern Iranian. As opposed to the Middle Western Iranian diale ...
group of languages. This Iranian hypothesis relies principally on the fact that the Greek inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea Coast contain several hundreds of Sarmatian names showing a close affinity to the
Ossetian language. However, the classification of the Iranian languages in general is not fully resolved, and the Eastern Iranian languages are not shown to form an actual genetic subgroup.
Some scholars detect a division of Scythian into two dialects: a western, more conservative dialect, and an eastern, more innovative one. The Scythian languages may have formed a
dialect continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated vari ...
:
* Alanian languages or Scytho-Sarmatian in the west: were spoken by people originally of Iranian stock from the 8th and 7th century BC onwards in the area of
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inva ...
, Southern
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-ei ...
and
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbeki ...
. Modern
Ossetian survives as a continuation of the language family ''possibly'' represented by Scytho-Sarmatian inscriptions, although the Scytho-Sarmatian language family "does not simply represent the same
ssetianlanguage" at an earlier date.
*
Saka languages or Scytho-Khotanese in the east: spoken in the first century in the
Kingdom of Khotan (located in present-day
Xinjiang
Xinjiang, SASM/GNC: ''Xinjang''; zh, c=, p=Xīnjiāng; formerly romanized as Sinkiang (, ), officially the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China (PRC), located in the northwes ...
, China), and including the Khotanese of
Khotan and Tumshuqese of
Tumshuq.
Another dialect of Scythian evolved into the
Sogdian language
The Sogdian language was an Eastern Iranian language spoken mainly in the Central Asian region of Sogdia (capital: Samarkand; other chief cities: Panjakent, Fergana, Khujand, and Bukhara), located in modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakh ...
.
Another East Iranian language related to the Scythian is the
Chorasmian language.
Phonology
The Scythian language possessed the following phonemes:
History
Early Eastern Iranians originated in the
Yaz culture (ca. 1500–1100 BC) in
Central Asia
Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes the fo ...
. The Scythians migrated from Central Asia toward
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is a subregion of the European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic connotations. The vast majority of the region is covered by Russia, whi ...
in the 8th and 7th century BC, occupying today's Southern
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-ei ...
and
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inva ...
and the
Carpathian Basin and parts of
Moldova
Moldova ( , ; ), officially the Republic of Moldova ( ro, Republica Moldova), is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. The unrecognised state of Transnistri ...
and
Dobruja
Dobruja or Dobrudja (; bg, Добруджа, Dobrudzha or ''Dobrudža''; ro, Dobrogea, or ; tr, Dobruca) is a historical region in the Balkans that has been divided since the 19th century between the territories of Bulgaria and Romania. I ...
. They disappeared from history after the
Hunnish
The Huns were a nomadic people who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe between the 4th and 6th century AD. According to European tradition, they were first reported living east of the Volga River, in an area that was par ...
invasion of Europe in the 5th century AD, and Turkic (
Avar,
Batsange, etc.) and Slavic peoples probably assimilated most people speaking Scythian. However, in the
Caucasus
The Caucasus () or Caucasia (), is a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, mainly comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia. The Caucasus Mountains, including the Greater Caucasus range, have historica ...
, the
Ossetian language belonging to the Scythian linguistic continuum remains in use , while in Central Asia, some languages belonging to Eastern Iranian group are still spoken, namely
Pashto
Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani ().
Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official langua ...
,
Pamir languages and
Yaghnobi.
Corpus
Inscriptions
Some scholars ascribe certain inscribed objects found in the
Carpathian Basin and in
Central Asia
Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes the fo ...
to the Scythians, but the interpretation of these inscriptions remains disputed (given that nobody has definitively identified the alphabet or translated the content).
Saqqez inscription
An inscription from
Saqqez, dating from the
Scythian presence in Western Asia, and written in the
Hieroglyphic Luwian script, may represent Scythian:
The king mentioned in this inscription is the same individual as the Scythian king
, whose name is attested as in
Assyrian
Assyrian may refer to:
* Assyrian people, the indigenous ethnic group of Mesopotamia.
* Assyria, a major Mesopotamian kingdom and empire.
** Early Assyrian Period
** Old Assyrian Period
** Middle Assyrian Empire
** Neo-Assyrian Empire
* Assyri ...
records and as in
Greek records.
Issyk inscription
The
Issyk inscription
The Issyk inscription is a yet undeciphered text, found in 1969 on a silver bowl in Issyk kurgan in Kazakhstan, dated at approximately the 4th century BC. The context of the burial gifts indicates that it may belong to Saka tribes.
Description
...
is not yet certainly deciphered, and is probably in a Scythian dialect, constituting one of very few
autochthonous epigraphic traces of that language.
János Harmatta, using the
Kharoṣṭhī script, identified the language as a
Khotanese Saka
Saka, or Sakan, was a variety of Eastern Iranian languages, attested from the ancient Buddhist kingdoms of Khotan, Kashgar and Tumshuq in the Tarim Basin, in what is now southern Xinjiang, China. It is a Middle Iranian language. The two ...
dialect spoken by the
Kushans, tentatively translating:
Personal names
The primary sources for Scythian words remain the Scythian toponyms, tribal names, and numerous personal names in the ancient Greek texts and in the Greek inscriptions found in the Greek colonies on the Northern
Black Sea
The Black Sea is a marginal mediterranean sea of the Atlantic Ocean lying between Europe and Asia, east of the Balkans, south of the East European Plain, west of the Caucasus, and north of Anatolia. It is bounded by Bulgaria, Georgia, Rom ...
Coast. These names suggest that the Sarmatian language had close similarities to modern Ossetian.
Recorded Scythian personal names include:
(), meaning “seed,” “germ,” and “kinship.”
, -
,
, ,
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...
: ,
romanized:
, , Means “possessing greatness through his words.” Composed of:
:, “word.” Compare with
Avestan (), “spoken,” and (), “word”.
:, “great.”
, -
,
, ,
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...
: ,
romanized:
, , Hypocorostic derivation from the word , meaning “chest armour, armour.” Compare with
Avestan (), () “chest armour.”
Place names
Some scholars believe that many toponyms and hydronyms of the Russian and Ukrainian steppe have Scythian links. For example,
Vasmer associates the name of the river
Don with an assumed/reconstructed unattested Scythian word *''dānu'' "water, river", and with Avestan ''dānu-'', Pashto ''dand'' and Ossetian ''don''.
The river names
Don,
Donets
The Seversky Donets () or Siverskyi Donets (), usually simply called the Donets, is a river on the south of the East European Plain. It originates in the Central Russian Upland, north of Belgorod, flows south-east through Ukraine (Kharkiv, D ...
,
Dnieper
}
The Dnieper () or Dnipro (); , ; . is one of the major transboundary rivers of Europe, rising in the Valdai Hills near Smolensk, Russia, before flowing through Belarus and Ukraine to the Black Sea. It is the longest river of Ukraine an ...
,
Danube
The Danube ( ; ) is a river that was once a long-standing frontier of the Roman Empire and today connects 10 European countries, running through their territories or being a border. Originating in Germany, the Danube flows southeast for , pa ...
, and
Dniester
The Dniester, ; rus, Дне́стр, links=1, Dnéstr, ˈdⁿʲestr; ro, Nistru; grc, Τύρᾱς, Tyrās, ; la, Tyrās, la, Danaster, label=none, ) ( ,) is a transboundary river in Eastern Europe. It runs first through Ukraine and t ...
, and lake
Donuzlav (the deepest one in
Crimea
Crimea, crh, Къырым, Qırım, grc, Κιμμερία / Ταυρική, translit=Kimmería / Taurikḗ ( ) is a peninsula in Ukraine, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, that has been occupied by Russia since 2014. It has a p ...
) may also belong with the same word-group.
Recorded Scythian place names include:
Herodotus' Scythian etymologies
The Greek historian
Herodotus
Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria (Italy). He is known fo ...
provides another source of Scythian; he reports that the Scythians called the
Amazons
In Greek mythology, the Amazons (Ancient Greek: Ἀμαζόνες ''Amazónes'', singular Ἀμαζών ''Amazōn'', via Latin ''Amāzon, -ŏnis'') are portrayed in a number of ancient epic poems and legends, such as the Labours of Hercule ...
''Oiorpata'', and explains the name as a compound of ''oior'', meaning "man", and ''pata'', meaning "to kill" (''Hist''. 4,110).
* Most scholars associate ''oior'' "man" with Avestan ''vīra-'' "man, hero", Sanskrit ''vīra-'', Latin ''vir'' (gen. ''virī'') "man, hero, husband", PIE . Various explanations account for ''pata'' "kill":
*# Persian ''pat-'' "(to) kill", ''patxuste'' "killed";
*# Sogdian ''pt-'' "(to) kill", ''ptgawsty'' "killed";
*# Ossetian ''fædyn'' "cleave", Sanskrit ''pātayati'' "fell", PIE "fall".
*# Avestan ''paiti-'' "lord", Sanskrit ''páti'', PIE , cf. Lat. ''potestate'' (i.e. "man-ruler");
*# Ossetian ''maryn'' "kill", Pashto ''mrəl'', Sanskrit ''mārayati'', PIE "die" (confusion of Greek
Μ and
Π);
* Alternatively, one scholar suggests Iranian ''aiwa-'' "one" + ''warah-'' "breast", the Amazons believed to have removed a breast to aid drawing a bow, according to some ancient folklorists, and as reflected in Greek
folk-etymology
Folk etymology (also known as popular etymology, analogical reformation, reanalysis, morphological reanalysis or etymological reinterpretation) is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more famili ...
: ''
a-'' (privative) + ''mazos'', "without
breast
The breast is one of two prominences located on the upper ventral region of a primate's torso. Both females and males develop breasts from the same embryological tissues.
In females, it serves as the mammary gland, which produces and sec ...
".
Elsewhere Herodotus explains the name of the mythical one-eyed tribe
Arimaspoi as a compound of the Scythian words ''arima'', meaning "one", and ''spu'', meaning "eye" (''Hist''. 4,27).
* Some scholars connect ''arima'' "one" with Ossetian ''ærmæst'' "only", Avestic ''airime'' "quiet", Greek ''erēmos'' "empty", PIE ?, and ''spu'' "eye" with Avestic ''spas-'' "foretell", Sanskrit ''spaś-'', PIE "see".
* However, Iranian usually expresses "one" and "eye" with words like ''aiwa-'' and ''čašman-'' (Ossetian ''īw'' and ''cæst'').
* Other scholars reject Herodotus' etymology and derive the ethnonym
Arimaspoi from Iranian ''aspa-'' "horse" instead.
* Or the first part of the name may reflect something like Iranian ''raiwant-'' "rich", cf. Ossetian ''riwæ'' "rich".
Scythian theonyms
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/2479), called Pliny the Elder (), was a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the emperor Vespasian. He wrote the encyclopedic ' ...
's ''Natural History'' (AD 77–79) derives the name of the
Caucasus
The Caucasus () or Caucasia (), is a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, mainly comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia. The Caucasus Mountains, including the Greater Caucasus range, have historica ...
from the Scythian ''kroy-khasis'' = ice-shining, white with snow (cf. Greek ''cryos'' = ice-cold).
Aristophanes
In the comedy works of
Aristophanes
Aristophanes (; grc, Ἀριστοφάνης, ; c. 446 – c. 386 BC), son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion ( la, Cydathenaeum), was a comic playwright or comedy-writer of ancient Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his ...
, the dialects of various Greek people are accurately imitated. In his ''
Thesmophoriazusae'', a
Scythian archer (a member of a police force in Athens) speaks broken Greek, consistently omitting the final ''-s'' () and ''-n'' (), using the
lenis in place of the
aspirate, and once using ''ks'' () in place of ''s'' (
sigma); these may be used to elucidate the Scythian languages.
Alanian
The Alanian language as spoken by the
Alans from about the 5th to the 11th centuries AD formed a
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...
directly descended from the earlier Scytho-Sarmatian languages, and forming in its turn the ancestor of the
Ossetian language.
Byzantine Greek authors recorded only a few fragments of this language.
[
Ladislav Zgusta, "The old Ossetian Inscription from the River Zelenčuk" (Veröffentlichungen der Iranischen Kommission = Sitzungsberichte der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse 486) Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1987. in Kim, op.cit., 54.
]
See also
*
Getae
The Getae ( ) or Gets ( ; grc, Γέται, singular ) were a Thracian-related tribe that once inhabited the regions to either side of the Lower Danube, in what is today northern Bulgaria and southern Romania. Both the singular form ''Get'' an ...
*
Dacian language
Notes
Bibliography
*
*
Harmatta, J.: ''Studies in the History and Language of the Sarmatians'', Szeged 1970.
*
*
* Humbach, Helmut & Klaus Faiss. ''Herodotus’s Scythians and Ptolemy’s Central Asia: Semasiological and Onomasiological Studies''. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2012
*
*
Mayrhofer, M.: ''Einiges zu den Skythen, ihrer Sprache, ihrem Nachleben''. Vienna 2006.
*
* .
*
*
Zgusta, L.: ''Die griechischen Personennamen griechischer Städte der nördlichen Schwarzmeerküste. Die ethnischen Verhältnisse, namentlich das Verhältnis der Skythen und Sarmaten, im Lichte der Namenforschung'', Prague 1955.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scythian Languages
Eastern Iranian languages
Extinct languages of Asia
Extinct languages of Europe
Languages attested from the 1st millennium BC
Scythians
Sarmatians
History of Ural