The Saka

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East of the Caspian the grassland climbs. It rises off the Aral flats, follows the long water the Greeks called the Iaxartes and the Persians the Jaxartes — the Syr Darya — and lifts at last into the high pastures of the Pamir, the Tian Shan, and the Altai, where the summer grazing lies above the tree line and the winters drive everything down again. This is not the open Pontic plain of the western Scythians but a harder, higher country, folded between deserts and mountain walls. The people who held it were horsemen of the same stock and the same gear as the lords of the Black Sea steppe — the composite bow, the short sword, the herd that walked, the burial mound raised over the dead. The Greeks who came to know them on the far rim of their world counted them among the Scythians. The Persians, who shared a border with them and a language not too distant, called them by a name of their own: Saka.

A people east of the Caspian

The Saka were not a single nation but a family of peoples, Iranian-speaking nomads spread across the eastern half of the steppe world. Their tongue belonged to the Eastern Iranian branch, a cousin of the Old Persian of the royal inscriptions and of the language behind the hymns of the Iranian priesthood, recoverable today chiefly from personal names and, far to the east and many centuries later, from the Khotanese-Saka documents of the Tarim oases. The word itself is generic. Scholars derive it from an Iranian root meaning to go or to roam, so that “Saka” carries within it the sense of the ones who move — less an ethnic label than a name for the way of life, the herd and the wagon and the seasonal road. The Persians used it of the nomads on their northern and eastern frontier; the Greeks, meeting the same continuum of horse-peoples, folded them into the wider word Scythian. The two names answer to one world, and modern usage has settled on a working division of labor: the Scythians for the western steppe behind the Black Sea colonies, the Saka for the eastern wing — the steppes and highlands of Central Asia from the Aral to the Altai and on into the Tarim Basin.

That division is a convenience, not a wall. The Saka shared the whole Scythian inheritance: the mounted archer who could shoot at the gallop and wheel away from a charge; the kurgan, the heaped burial mound that gave the dead their only fixed address in a moving world; the herds of horses, sheep, and cattle that carried the people’s wealth on four legs and could not be besieged or starved into a stand; and the art that twisted the beasts of the steppe — the stag, the cat, the raptor, the argali — across gold and felt and bronze in the manner later ages would name the “animal style.” A reference summary of the field puts the kinship plainly: the Saka and the Scythians were Iranian-speaking horse nomads who sacrificed horses and buried their dead in mound tombs, and many scholars treat them together as Saka-Scythian, a single cultural continuum reaching from the Black Sea to Xinjiang (Britannica, “Scythian”). What set the Saka apart was where they lived and who wrote them down: not the Greeks of the Pontic shore but the kings of Persia, on the rock of their own monuments.

The Saka in the Persian record

The fullest ancient naming of the Saka comes not from a historian but from a cliff. On the limestone face of Mount Behistun, above the road that ran from Babylon toward the Iranian plateau, Darius I cut a great trilingual inscription and relief — Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian — recording his seizure of the throne and the crushing of the rebellions of his first regnal years, around 520 BCE (World History Encyclopedia, “Behistun Inscription”). Among the conquered enemies carved in a row of bound captives, the last and latest added is a tall figure in a high pointed cap. He is Skunkha, king of the Sakā tigraxaudā, the “pointed-hat Saka,” taken by Darius in a campaign across the water of the northeastern frontier (Skunkha — Wikipedia). The Persians did not see a faceless horde. They saw a people with kings worth defeating and worth depicting, and they distinguished the Saka into named divisions.

The Achaemenid inscriptions know the Saka by epithet. The Sakā tigraxaudā are the “Saka with pointed caps,” placed by most readings in the steppe and highland country east of the Caspian and around the lower Iaxartes; some scholars identify them, or part of them, with the Massagetae. The Sakā haumavargā are the “haoma-honoring” or “haoma-drinking” Saka — the name carries the haoma, the sacred plant and pressed drink of the Iranian world — set around the Pamir and the Ferghana valley to the east. The Sakā tayaiy paradraya are the “Saka beyond the sea,” which in the imperial frame meant the Scythians of the Pontic steppe to the northwest. A further group, the Saka “beyond Sogdiana,” held the far northeastern edge along the Iaxartes (Saka — Wikipedia). These are Persian categories, set down for Persian purposes — a tax-and-tribute geography seen from the throne, not a Saka account of themselves — and the exact peoples behind the epithets, above all the relation of the pointed-hat Saka to the Massagetae, remain contested. What the inscriptions establish beyond dispute is that the Saka were real enough, and dangerous enough, to be named, fought, and listed by the largest empire of the age.

They were also enrolled in it. Once subdued along the frontier, Saka contingents rode in the Achaemenid host; Herodotus, cataloguing the army Xerxes led against Greece, lists the Saka among its peoples, set down beside the Bactrians and marked by their tall stiff caps and their bows and axes. And the eastern nomads had already written one verdict into Persian memory before Darius. By the account of Herodotus, Cyrus the Great — the empire’s founder — died in the far northeast fighting the Massagetae, the horse-people beyond the river, whose queen Tomyris, the story runs, took her revenge on the conqueror’s body. Whether the people who killed Cyrus were truly the Massagetae or another eastern nation the sources confuse with them is among the things antiquity left unsettled. But the shape of the memory is clear: the steppe, for the Persians as for the Greeks, was the country where empires reached their limit.

A word of caution belongs here, for the names cross. In the later Achaemenid period and in Babylonian usage the term Gimirri — properly the word for the Cimmerians, the earlier steppe people who had raided down into Anatolia in the eighth and seventh centuries — came to be applied loosely to the Saka as well, a settled scribe’s shorthand for “the nomads of the north” that flattened two distinct peoples into one foreign category. The carry-over is a fact about the writers, not about the ridden world. The Cimmerians were the displaced raiders of an earlier age, known through the Assyrian annals and the Greeks and largely gone before the Saka enter the Persian record; the Saka are the eastern Scythians of Central Asia, Darius’s named adversary and his enrolled subjects. That a Babylonian clerk could reach for the old word does not merge the peoples; it only marks how the literate south saw the steppe — as a single rumor at the edge of the map, where the careful eye finds many nations.

The Saka and Scythian realms across the Eurasian steppe — the eastern Saka country reaching from the Aral and the Syr Darya to the Pamir, the Tian Shan, and the Altai. Base map naturalearthdata.com, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The gold of the eastern steppe

If the Persian inscriptions give the Saka their names, the eastern kurgans give them their faces and their dead. The graves of the western Scythians — Kul-Oba above the strait, Solokha on the Dnieper, Tolstaya Mogila with its golden pectoral — have their cousins in the east, and the most spectacular of them came to light not on the Pontic plain but at the foot of the Tian Shan.

About fifty kilometers east of Almaty, in the foothills of the Trans-Ili Alatau, lies a field of large burial mounds known as the Issyk kurgans. In 1969 the Soviet archaeologist Kemal Akishev excavated one of them and found, in an undisturbed side chamber that grave-robbers had missed, a young person laid out in a blaze of gold (Issyk kurgan — Wikipedia). The burial dates to roughly the fourth or third century BCE. The skeleton was that of someone about sixteen to eighteen years old, of a sex the remains do not securely give, almost certainly from the family of a Saka chief. What survived around the body was a costume: more than four thousand small gold plaques and ornaments — arrows, snow leopards, argali, horses, birds — sewn across the clothing and boots until the whole figure, when reconstructed, stands sheathed in gold. A tall conical headdress rose above it, worked with winged horses, mountain cats, and the image of a tree; an iron sword and dagger lay at the body, and beside them a silver cup bearing a short inscription in a script that has not been deciphered. This is the burial that gave the Saka their popular name in the modern world: the Golden Man.

The reconstructed costume of the Issyk burial, sewn with more than four thousand gold plaques — the “Golden Man,” a young Saka noble of the fourth or third century BCE. Photograph by eggry, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Golden Man is the eastern kinsman of the Pontic lords, and the kinship runs deeper than gold. The animal forms on the Issyk plaques — the springing cat, the antlered beast, the predator over its prey — speak the same grammar of the steppe as the electrum vessel of Kul-Oba and the pectoral of Tolstaya Mogila. So does the rite of the great mound itself: the noble dead given a chamber under a heaped tumulus, dressed for a journey, equipped with weapons and the means of a feast. Farther east and north, in the high Altai, that world is preserved more completely than anywhere else. There the ground freezes the dead in place. The frozen tombs of the Altai — kin to the burials of Pazyryk, where permafrost sealed felts, carpets, tattooed skin, and sacrificed horses for two and a half thousand years — belong to the eastern steppe peoples the Saka stood among, and they return, in perishable material, what the gold alone could only imply: the saddled horse for the road, the patterned felt, the marked body, the long furniture of the journey out of the world.

What the Saka made of that journey, we know only at the edges. They left no scripture and no myth in their own words. Their religion is glimpsed in the silent witness of the graves — the fire, the horse, the feast laid for the dead, the care taken to send the noble out fully armed and adorned — and in the comparative study of the Iranian world they belonged to, where fire, the sun, and the sacred drink stand near the center. The Sakā haumavargā carry the haoma in their very name, the pressed plant of the Iranian rite; but what the Saka themselves did at the fire, what they named the powers, how they imagined the road of the dead, the record does not say. Where the steppe is silent it is best left silent. The burials are eloquent about death and almost mute about belief, and the honest account stops where the evidence does.

It is tempting to read across to the western Scythians and borrow their gods. Herodotus, who never went among the Saka, gave the Pontic Scythians a pantheon of named powers in his Greek translation — the fire-queen matched to the Greek Hestia, the sky-father set against Zeus, the sun-god aligned with Apollo — and the kinship of language and gear makes it likely that the eastern nomads honored powers of the same kind: the hearth-fire, the high sky, the sun over the grass, the sacred drink. But likeness is not identity, and what holds for the steppe behind the Black Sea cannot simply be carried a thousand miles east and laid over a people the Greek geographer never reached. The eastern theology is a blank the comparative method can color only faintly. The Saka kept fire, rode the horse, drank the haoma; beyond that the careful reader marks the limit of what the sources will bear, and declines to furnish the dead with a creed they did not leave behind.

The eastern wing of the Scythian world

The Saka enter history, then, through three doors, each opening at its own distance. The first is the royal inscription — Darius on the rock at Behistun, naming the pointed-hat Saka and their captured king, listing the divisions by their epithets; Xerxes’ army-roll with its Saka in their stiff caps. This is the steppe seen from a throne, in an enemy’s categories, exact about names and tribute and silent about the inner life of the people named. The second is the Greek history — Herodotus on Cyrus and the Massagetae, on the Saka in the Persian host — external, interested, often turning the nomad into a figure of the empire’s far frontier. The third, and the one that has grown fastest, is the spade: the Issyk burial and its Golden Man, the frozen Altai tombs, the animal-style gold, abundant and eloquent and mute, read by the archaeologists who recovered them. The comparative study of the Iranian tongue runs beneath all three, reading the names — Saka, haumavarga, tigraxauda — back into the language the people spoke.

Out of those doors the modern recognition of the Saka took shape: not as a lost or minor horde at the map’s edge, but as the eastern wing of a single great steppe world, the same world the Greeks had met in the west and called Scythian. The gold of the Tian Shan answers the gold of the Dnieper; the kurgan of Issyk answers the kurgans of the Pontic plain; the bow and the horse and the heaped mound and the twisting beasts are one inheritance, held across thousands of miles by peoples who knew each other as kin and were known to their settled neighbors by two names for one thing.

The afterlife of that gold has been a thing of its own. The Issyk costume, reconstructed, became one of the national symbols of independent Kazakhstan, set on monuments and standards as the Golden Man — a young Saka noble of the fourth century BCE pressed into service as an emblem of a twentieth- and twenty-first-century nation. The honor is genuine, and so is the distance: a burial costume sewn for a particular dead child of the high pastures is not a flag, and the people who made it neither knew nor needed the meanings later laid on it. Their own claim is older and quieter. They were the riders of the eastern grass, named on the Persian rock and laid in the golden mounds, the Scythians of the country where the steppe climbs toward the roof of the world.

→ Related: Scythians · The Sarmatians · The Cimmerians · Pazyryk · Kul Oba · Solokha · Tolstaya Mogila · Tabiti · Papaios · Api Goddess · Argimpasa · Goitosyros · Herodotus · Apollo · Zeus · Hestia