Documents on wood and paper were written in modified Brahmi script with the addition of extra characters over time and unusual conjuncts such as ys for z.[4] The documents date from the fourth to the eleventh century. Tumshuqese was more archaic than Khotanese,[5] but it is much less understood because it appears in fewer manuscripts compared to Khotanese. The Khotanese dialect is believed to share features with the modern Wakhi and Pashto.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] Saka was known as "Hvatanai" in contemporary documents.[13] Many Prakrit terms were borrowed from Khotanese into the Tocharian languages.
The two known dialects of Saka are associated with a movement of the Scythians. No invasion of the region is recorded in Chinese records and one theory is that two tribes of the Saka, speaking the two dialects, settled in the region in about 200 BC before the Chinese accounts commence.[14]
The Khotanese dialect is attested in texts between the 7th and 10th centuries, though some fragments are dated to the 5th and 6th centuries. The far more limited material in the Tumshuqese dialect cannot be dated with precision, but most of it is thought to date to the late 7th or the 8th century.[15][16]
In the 11th century, it was remarked by Mahmud al-Kashgari that the people of Khotan still had their own language and script and did not know Turkic well.[17][18] According to Kashgari some non-Turkic languages like the Kanchaki and Sogdian were still used in some areas.[19] It is believed that the Saka language group was what Kanchaki belonged to.[20] It is believed that the Tarim Basin became linguistically Turkified by the end of the 11th century.[21]
Manuscript in Khotanese from Dandan Oilik, NE of Khotan. Now held in the British Library.
Other than an inscription from Issyk kurgan that has been tentatively identified as Khotanese (although written in Kharosthi), all of the surviving documents originate from Khotan or Tumshuq. Khotanese is attested from over 2,300 texts[23] preserved among the Dunhuang manuscripts, as opposed to just 15 texts[24] in Tumshuqese. These were deciphered by Harold Walter Bailey.[25] The earliest texts, from the fourth century, are mostly religious documents. There were several viharas in the Kingdom of Khotan and Buddhist translations are common at all periods of the documents. There are many reports to the royal court (called haṣḍa aurāsa) which are of historical importance, as well as private documents. An example of a document is Or.6400/2.3.
↑ History of Civilizations of Central Asia. Paris: UNESCO. 1992. p.283. ISBN92-3-103211-9.
↑ Frye, R.N. (1984). The History of Ancient Iran. p.192. ISBN9783406093975. [T]hese western Saka he distinguishes from eastern Saka who moved south through the Kashgar-Tashkurgan-Gilgit-Swat route to the plains of the sub-continent of India. This would account for the existence of the ancient Khotanese-Saka speakers, documents of whom have been found in western Sinkiang, and the modern Wakhi language of Wakhan in Afghanistan, another modern branch of descendants of Saka speakers parallel to the Ossetes in the west.
↑ Bailey, H.W. (1982). The culture of the Sakas in ancient Iranian Khotan. Caravan Books. pp.7–10. It is noteworthy that the Wakhi language of Wakhan has features, phonetics, and vocabulary the nearest of Iranian dialects to Khotan Saka.
↑ Carpelan, C.; Parpola, A.; Koskikallio, P. (2001). "Early Contacts Between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations: Papers Presented at an International Symposium Held at the Tvärminne Research Station of the University of Helsinki, 8–10 January, 1999". Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura. 242: 136. ...descendants of these languages survive now only in the Ossete language of the Caucasus and the Wakhi language of the Pamirs, the latter related to the Saka once spoken in Khotan.
↑ "Encolypedia Iranica, AFGHANISTAN vi. Paṣ̌tō". It is, however, possible that the original home of Paṣ̌tō may have been in Badaḵšān, somewhere between Munǰī and Sangl. and Shugh., with some contact with a Saka dialect akin to Khotanese.
↑ Indo-Iranica. Kolkata, India: Iran Society. 1946. pp.173–174. ... and their language is most closely related to on the one hand with Saka on the other with Munji-Yidgha
↑ Bečka, Jiří (1969). A Study in Pashto Stress. Academia. p.32. Pashto in its origin, is probably a Saka dialect.
↑ Cheung, Jonny (2007). Etymological Dictionary of the Iranian Verb. (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series).
↑ Bailey, H. W. (1939). "The Rāma Story in Khotanese". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 59 (4): 460–468. doi:10.2307/594480. JSTOR594480.
↑ Bailey, H. W. (1970). "Saka Studies: The Ancient Kingdom of Khotan". Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies. 8 (1): 68. doi:10.2307/4299633. JSTOR4299633.
↑ Emmerick, R. E.; Pulleyblank, E. G. (1993). A Chinese text in Central Asian Brahmi script: new evidence for the pronunciation of Late Middle Chinese and Khotanese. Roma: Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente.
↑ Maggi, M. (2022). "Some remarks on the history of the Khotanese orthography and the Brāhmī script in Khotan". Annual Report of the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University. 25: 149–172.
Emmerick, R. E.; Pulleyblank, E. G. (1993). A Chinese text in Central Asian Brahmi script: new evidence for the pronunciation of Late Middle Chinese and Khotanese. Roma: Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente. (On connections between Chinese and Khotanese, such as loan words and pronunciations)
Litvinsky, Boris Abramovich; Vorobyova-Desyatovskaya, M. I. (1999). "Religions and Religious Movements". History of Civilizations of Central Asia. Motilal Banarsidass. pp.421–448. ISBN8120815408.
Maggi, M. (2022). "Some remarks on the history of the Khotanese orthography and the Brāhmī script in Khotan". Annual Report of the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University. 25: 149–172.
The Saka, Shaka, or Sacae were a group of nomadic Eastern Iranian peoples who historically inhabited the northern and eastern Eurasian Steppe and the Tarim Basin.
Hotan or Khotan is a major oasis town in southwestern Xinjiang, an autonomous region in Northwestern China. The city proper of Hotan broke off from the larger Hotan County to become an administrative area in its own right in August 1984. It is the seat of Hotan Prefecture.
The Kingdom of Khotan was an ancient Buddhist Saka kingdom located on the branch of the Silk Road that ran along the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert in the Tarim Basin. The ancient capital was originally sited to the west of modern-day Hotan at Yotkan. From the Han dynasty until at least the Tang dynasty it was known in Chinese as Yutian. This largely Buddhist kingdom existed for over a thousand years until it was conquered by the Muslim Kara-Khanid Khanate in 1006, during the Islamization and Turkicization of Xinjiang.
The Tarim Basin is an endorheic basin in Xinjiang, Northwestern China occupying an area of about 888,000 km2 (343,000 sq mi) and one of the largest basins in Northwest China. Located in China's Xinjiang region, it is sometimes used synonymously to refer to the southern half of the province, that is, Southern Xinjiang or Nanjiang, as opposed to the northern half of the province known as Dzungaria or Beijiang. Its northern boundary is the Tian Shan mountain range and its southern boundary is the Kunlun Mountains on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The Taklamakan Desert dominates much of the basin. The historical Uyghur name for the Tarim Basin is Altishahr, which means 'six cities' in Uyghur. The region was also called Little Bukhara or Little Bukharia.
Wakhi is an Indo-European language in the Eastern Iranian branch of the language family spoken today in Wakhan District, Northern Afghanistan and also in Tajikistan, Northern Pakistan and Western China.
The Scythian languages are a group of Eastern Iranic languages of the classical and late antique period, spoken in a vast region of Eurasia 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. 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, more specifically from the Iranic group of Indo-Iranic languages.
The Sogdian language was an Eastern Iranian language spoken mainly in the Central Asian region of Sogdia, located in modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; it was also spoken by some Sogdian immigrant communities in ancient China. Sogdian is one of the most important Middle Iranian languages, along with Bactrian, Khotanese Saka, Middle Persian, and Parthian. It possesses a large literary corpus.
Bactrian is an extinct Eastern Iranian language formerly spoken in the Central Asian region of Bactria and used as the official language of the Kushan and the Hephthalite empires.
The Pashtun people are classified as an Iranian ethnic group. They are indigenous to southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan. Although a number of theories attempting to explain their ethnogenesis have been put forward, the exact origin of the Pashtun tribes is acknowledged as being obscure. Modern scholars have suggested that a common and singular origin is highly unlikely due to the Pashtuns' historical existence as a tribal confederation, and there is, in fact, no evidence attesting such an origin for the ethnicity. The early ancestors of modern-day Pashtuns may have belonged to the old Iranian tribes that spread throughout the easternmost Iranian plateau.
The Iranian languages, also called the Iranic languages, are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau.
The Eastern Iranian languages are a subgroup of the Iranian languages, having emerged during the Middle Iranian era. The Avestan language is often classified as early Eastern Iranian. As opposed to the Middle-era Western Iranian dialects, the Middle-era Eastern Iranian dialects preserve word-final syllables.
The Issyk inscription is a yet undeciphered text, possibly in the Kushan script, 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.
Sir Harold Walter Bailey,, who published as H. W. Bailey, was an English scholar of Khotanese, Sanskrit, and the comparative study of Iranian languages.
Iranian literature, or Iranic literature, refers to the literary traditions of the Iranian languages, developed predominantly in Iran and other regions in the Middle East and the Caucasus, eastern Asia Minor, and parts of western Central Asia and northwestern South Asia. These include works attested from as early as the 6th century BC. Modern Iranian literatures include Persian literature, Ossetian literature, Kurdish literature, Pashto literature, and Balochi literature, among others.
Buddhism in Khotan comprised bodies of Buddhist religious doctrine and institutions characteristic of the Iranic Kingdom of Khotan as well as much of Western China and Tajikistan. It was the state religion of the Kingdom of Khotan until its collapse in 1000. The dominant school of Buddhism in Khotan was the Mahāsāṃghika school - from which the Mahayana and Vajrayana schools would develop. The kingdom's vast collection of texts, which included the indigenous Book of Zambasta and a Khotanese translation of the Sanghata Sutra, helped Khotan influence the Buddhist practices of its neighbors, most notably Tibet.
Turkic peoples began settling in the Tarim Basin in the 7th century. The first settlers were likely Tang-allied Türk (Tujue) tribes. The area was later settled by the Uyghur people, who founded the Qocho Kingdom there in the 9th century. The historical area of what is modern-day Xinjiang consisted of the distinct areas of the Tarim Basin and Dzungaria. The area was first populated by Indo-European Tocharian and Saka peoples, who practiced Buddhism. The Tocharian and Saka peoples came under Chinese rule in the Han dynasty as the Protectorate of the Western Regions due to wars between the Han dynasty and the Xiongnu and again in the Tang dynasty as the Protectorate General to Pacify the West due to wars between the Tang dynasty and the First, Western, and Eastern Turkic Khaganates. The Tang dynasty withdrew its control of the region in the Protectorate General to Pacify the West and the Four Garrisons of Anxi after the An Lushan Rebellion, after which the Turkic peoples and the other native inhabitants living in the area gradually converted to Islam.
The Shule Kingdom was an ancient oasis kingdom of the Taklamakan Desert that was on the Northern Silk Road, in the historical Western Regions of what is now Xinjiang in Northwest China. Its capital was Kashgar, the source of Kashgar's water being a river of the same name. Much like the neighboring people of the Kingdom of Khotan, people of Kashgar spoke Saka, one of the Eastern Iranian languages.
The names of the Scythians are a topic of interest for classicists and linguists. The Scythians were an Iranic people best known for dominating much of the Pontic steppe from about 700 BC to 400 BC. The name of the Scythians is believed to be of Indo-European origin and to have meant "archer". The Scythians gave their name to the region of Scythia. The Persians referred to all Iranic nomads of the steppes, including the Scythians, as Sakas. Some modern scholars apply the name Scythians to all peoples of the Scytho-Siberian world, but this terminology is controversial.
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