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[edit] Sarts vs. Saks
- I have recently grown very interested in research on human population genetics, such as human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups, because of the potential it bears for resolving the prehistory of our ancestors and the evolution of the various ethnic groups and languages that we find in the world at present. I think that archaeology, historical linguistics, anthropology, and population genetics hold the greatest promise when they are used together to produce a higher resolution image of the history of the world's peoples.
- In that connection, I have been wondering lately about the origin of the Mongolic and Turkic term "Sart," which seems to have traditionally been used to refer to sedentary agriculturalists in contrast to nomadic communities, and is also the autonym of a certain Mongolic-speaking minority group in western China. I have enough background as a student of history and an amateur linguist to know that it would not be difficult for a protoform like */sarmat/, */sarwat/, or */sarbat/ (c.f. Sarmatae) to change over the generations into a form like /sart/. Could it be that both the Turks and the Tajiks are not only descendants of Scythians, but descendants of particular subsets of Scythians?
- As for the controversy over whether the Scythians were proto-Turkic or rather a branch of the Aryans, population genetics has certainly provided enough evidence to support a hypothesis that both the Turkic peoples of Central Asia/Siberia and the Aryan peoples of Central Asia/South Asia could share a great deal of recent common ancestry. Linguistic research into the histories and prehistoric origins of the various Aryan (Indo-Iranian), Indo-European, Altaic, and Uralic languages has also provided a basis for hypothesizing that all these myriad languages may share a common origin deep in antiquity. In fact, the emerging mainstream hypothesis among researchers who have been trying to reconstruct the prehistory of Homo sapiens sapiens is that all or nearly all the ancestors of modern peoples of Eurasia lived somewhere in India, Pakistan, Iran, or the Middle East as recently as 30,000 years ago. That is only about three times the age of the beginnings of Neolithic culture and perhaps a little under four times the age of the Indo-European language family. Actually, these results are not surprising at all when viewed in the light of archaeology: the inhabitants of Europe prior to approximately 30,000 years ago were all (or mostly) Neanderthals, and there is no unambiguous evidence for inhabitation of easterly places like China by anatomically modern humans prior to about 20,000 years BP (although there is, of course, the perennial controversy over the age of the Liujiang cranium), suggesting that early modern humans in East Eurasia might have kept to the southern coast and islands.
- So, returning to my main topic, does anyone else think it might be possible that "Sart" and "Sak" derive from terms contrasting the sedentary, town-dwelling, ground-tilling and mercantile classes (Sart) with the nomadic, herding, hunting, and warrior classes (Sak), and that these terms might reflect an extremely ancient social division within the people of greater "Scythia"? Ebizur 14:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] state of this article
I've finally gotten round to look through this article. And considering the amount of debate that went into it, it was in a horrible state. I've cleaned up the worst bits, ToC wise, removing redundancies, html comments and obvious nonsense, but this still needs a bit of work before it deserves its "B" status... dab (ᛏ) 17:20, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
- alright, I invested 2 hours(!) cleaning up, and I'd give it its 'B' now. dab (ᛏ) 18:42, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
