Scythians - Names

Names

Sulimirski views the Histories of Herodotus as the most important literary source relating to ancient Scyths. Herodotus provides a depiction that can be related to the results of archaeological research, but apparently knew little of the eastern part of Scythia. He did say that the ancient Persians called all the Scyths Σάκαι (Sacae, Herodotus 7.64). Their principal tribe, the "Royal Scyths", ruled the vast lands occupied by the nation as a whole (Herodotus 4.20), calling themselves Σκώλοτοι (Scōloti, Herodotus 4.6). Oswald Szemerényi devotes a thorough discussion to the etymologies of ancient ethnic words for the Scythians in his work "Four old Iranian ethnic names: Scythian – Skudra – Sogdian – Saka". In it, the names of Herodotus and the names of his title, except Saka, as well as many other words for "Scythian," such as Assyrian Aškuz and Greek Skuthēs, descend from *skeud-, an ancient Indo-European root meaning "propel, shoot" (cf. English shoot). *skud- is the zero-grade; that is, a variant in which the -e- is not present. The restored Scythian name is *Skuda (archer), which among the Pontic or Royal Scythians became *Skula, in which the d has been regularly replaced by an l.

Saka, on the other hand, Szemerényi relates to an Iranian verbal root, sak-, "go, roam", and hypothesizes that the Achaemenids used "nomad" to refer to the northern tribes, rather than their endonym. The name does appear somewhat further east than the Achaemenid Empire, as the Chinese knew the Asian Scythians as Sai (Chinese character: 塞, Old Sinitic *sək). Whether they adopted the Achaemenid name, or "Saka" came to be an endonym, it is not clear. The term "saka" (سکه) exists in modern Pashto, and means "related by blood" (e.g. saka wror means "blood brother"). The modern region of Sistan in eastern Iran and southern Afghanistan takes its name from the classical Sakestan ("land of the Saka").

Sakestan was not the only province of Scythian origin on the eastern margin of the Persian Empire. According to Szemerényi, Sogdiana was named from the Skuda form. Starting from the names of the province given in Old Persian inscriptions, Sugda and Suguda, and the knowledge derived from Middle Sogdian that Old Persian -gd- applied to Sogdian was actually pronounced as voiced fricatives, -γδ-, Szemerényi arrives at *Suγδa as an Old Sogdian endonym. Applying sound changes apparent in other Sogdian words and inherent in Indo-European he traces the development of *Suγδa from Skuda, "archer," as follows: Skuda > *Sukuda by anaptyxis > *Sukuδa > *Sukδa (syncope) > *Suγδa (assimilation).