Sart
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Sart is a name for the settled inhabitants of Central Asia which has had shifting meanings over the centuries. Sarts, known sometimes as "Ak-Sart" (White Sart) in ancient times, did not have any particular ethnic identification, and were usually (though not always) town-dwellers. There is a suggestion that the name is etymologically derived from "Sary It" (Yellow Dog) as an insulting term for town dwellers by nomads, and it was this supposed root which led the Soviets to abolish the term as "derogatory" (See below) - however Barthold believes this derivation to be false, and there is no literary or philological evidence to support it.
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[edit] History
[edit] Origin
"Sart" seems to have originated as a term used by nomads to describe settled people and town dwellers, from the Indic root Sarthavaha meaning a merchant or caravan-leader (related to the modern Hindi word Seth). It probably entered Uyghur from Soghdian in the 8th or 9th centuries AD. The earliest known use of the term is in the Turkic book Kudatku Bilik ("Blessed Knowledge"), dated 1070, where it refers to the settled population of Kashgaria, and in this period it apparently could be used to refer to all settled Muslims of Central Asia, Persian or Turkic-speaking. Rashid al-din in the Jami' al-Tawarikh writes that Genghis Khan commanded that Arslan Khan, prince of the Muslim Turkic Qarluqs, be given the title "Sartaqtai", which he considered to be synonymous with "Tajik" (It is possible, however, that Rashid al-din, who was Persian, misunderstood the meaning of this, as "Sartaqtai" was the name of one Genghis Khan's sons).
[edit] Alternative Meanings
In the post-Mongol period we find that Ali Sher Nawa'i refers to the Iranian people as "Sart Ulusi", and for him "Sart tili" was a synonym for the Persian language. Similarly when Babur refers to the people of Margelan as "Sarts", it is in distinction to the people of Andijan who are Turks, and it is clear that by this he means Persian-speakers. He also refers to the population of the towns and villages of the vilayat of Kabul as "Sarts".
A further change of use seems to have occurred with the arrival in the oasis regions of Turkestan of the Uzbeks under Shaybani Khan. They distinguished between themselves as semi-nomadic speakers of a Kipchak dialect, and the settled Turkic-speaking populations already living in the oasis towns, most of whom spoke the Qarluq dialect. It is at this date that the distinction between the terms "Sart" and "Tajik" seems to have made itself felt, as previously they were often used interchangeably. Even after the Uzbeks switched to a settled way of life, they continued to maintain this distinction between Turkic-speakers who were members of one of the Uzbek tribes, and "Sarts" who were not.
[edit] Modern Meanings
Barthold argues that by the 19th century those described as "Sarts" had become much more Turkicised than had previously been the case. In the literature of Imperial Russia in the 19th century the term was sometimes used to denote the Turkic-speaking peoples of Ferghana, Tashkent, Chimkent and the Southern Syr Darya Oblast, whilst they were also found in smaller numbers in Samarkand and Bukhara. ‘Sart’ was also commonly employed by the Russians as a general term for all the settled natives of Turkestan. There was a great deal of debate over what this actually meant, and where the name came from. Barthold writes that “To the Kazakh every member of a settled community was a Sart whether his language was Turkish or Iranian”. N.P. Ostroumov was firm in his conviction that it was not an ethnic definition but an occupational one, and he backed this up by quoting some (apparently common) local sayings: “A bad Kirghiz becomes a Sart, whilst a bad Sart becomes a Kirghiz”. This confusion reached its peak in the 1897 Russian Empire Census: the Ferghana Oblast was held to have a very large ‘Sart’ population, the neighbouring Samarkand Oblast very few but a great many ‘Uzbeks’ . The distinction between the two was often far from clear, although historically speaking the Uzbeks were descended from tribes which arrived in the region with Shaibani Khan in the 16th century, whilst Sarts belonged to older settled groups. It seems that, in Khorezm at least, Sarts spoke a form of Persianised Oghuz Turkic whilst Uzbeks spoke a Kipchak dialect closer to Kazakh. In Fergana Sarts spoke a Qarluq dialect that was very close to Uyghur and is, indeed, the ancestor of modern ‘Uzbek’. In 1924 the Soviet regime decreed that henceforth all settled Turks in Central Asia would be known as 'Uzbeks', and that the term 'Sart' was to be abolished as an insulting legacy of colonial rule. The language chosen for the new Uzbek SSR was not, however, Uzbek, but 'Sart'.
It is thus very difficult to attach a single ethnic or even linguistic meaning to the term "Sart". Historically the various Turkic and Persian peoples of Central Asia were identified mostly by their lifestyle, rather than by any notional ethnic or even linguistic difference. The Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Turkmens were nomads, herding across steppes, mountains and sand deserts, respectively. The settled Turks and Tajiks, on the other hand, were Sarts, as they either lived in cities such as Khiva, Bukhara or Samarkand, or they lived in rural agricultural communities.
[edit] References
- N.V. Ostroumov Значение Названия «Сарт» (Tashkent) 1884
- N.V. Ostroumov Сарты – Этнографические Материалы (Tashkent) 1890 (p7)
- V.V. Barthold “Sart” Ency. of Islam Vol. IV S-Z (Leiden & London) 1934 pp175-6
- W. Barthold & Maria Eva Subtelny "Sart" Ency. of Islam New Edition Vol. IX SAN-SZE (Leiden: Brill) 1997 pp66-8
- Yuri Bregel "The Sarts in the Khanate of Khiva" Journal of Asian History Vol.12 1978 pp121-151
- Maria Eva Subtelny "The Symbiosis of Turk and Tajik" in B.F. Manz (ed.) Central Asia in Historical Perspective (Boulder, Col. & Oxford) 1994
- Ali Shir Nava'i Muhakamat al-lughatain tr. & ed. Robert Devereaux (Leiden: Brill) 1966
- Qudatgu Bilig (Istanbul) 1947 Vol.I p571
- The Baburnama Ed. & Trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (New York) 2002 pp5, 156
- Rashiduddin Fazlullah Jami'u't-Tawarikh: The Compendium of Chronicles Ed. & Trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (Harvard) 1998 p78
