"Scythian" is a cultural cover term for a
number of peoples, and it's hard to guarantee that they were linguistically
homogenous. Let's put it this way: they were predominantly northern (Saka)
Iranians, and the later "Sarmatian" tribes were linguistically akin to them in
linguistic trems.
The Iranians languages show numerous common
phonological innovations, lexical peculiarities, etc., which separate them from
Indo-Aryan and Nuristani and establish "Iranian" as a bona fide genetic
grouping. Still, even the earliest known forms of Iranian (Avestan, Old Persian,
Median) were already quite strongly differentiated. This is understandable in
view of the fact that the Iranians were divided into a great number of tribes
that expanded over a vast territory -- eventually extending from Eastern Europe
via Central Asia and the Middle East all the way to what is now Xinjiang (NW
China).
Nomadic speakers of late common
Indo-Iranian (or of early Indo-Aryan, Iranian and presumably other related
dialects -- cf. Nuristani) appeared in Central Asia (the Bactria-Margiana
cultural area) probably shortly after 2000 BC, migrating from somewhere within
the area of the steppe belt of SE Europe, Kazachstan and the plains of SW
Siberia. In several recent articles, Michael Witzel identifies the fabulous
Avestan "homeland of all Airiia (eastern Iranians)" (Airiianem Vae:jah) as the
Central Afghanistan Highlands, but the early Iranians were rather mobile:
eastern (Avestan) Iranians entered East Iran towards the end of the second
millennium BC. A couple of centuries later the western Iranian
Medes migrated south of the Caspian Sea to the eastern borders of
Mesopotamia, and the Persians crossed over from Central Asia
to northwestern and then southwestern Iran.
The homeland of Zarathustra, and of
Gathic (Gatha/Yasna Avestan, but not of the younger Avestan texts), was probably
NW Afghanistan. The absolute dating of Zarathustra's lifetime and of his
religious reform is extremely difficult (late 2nd millennium BC?). The
Zoroastrian revolution should not be associated with the (much earlier)
Indic/Iranian split, though in its wake the remaining Indo-Aryan "non-believers"
in Afghanistan and NW Iran were subjected to some kind of ethnic and religious
cleansing. Not all Iranians were converted to Zoroastrianism: the new religion,
influential as it was (especially after Darius I and his successors
accepted it), appears to have made at best small-scale inroads among
the northern Iranians. It had a long and complex life, becoming locally
amalgamated with older polytheistic beliefs (such as the Median non-Zoroastrian
religion) and giving rise to derived variants and heresies.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2002 9:20 PM
Subject: [tied] Scythians, Zoroastrians, etc.
I think I noticed in another thread that the Scythians were
not
Zoroastrians. But they were members of the (Indo)Iranian language
family?
Is there any evidence how many early Iranian-speaking groups
there
might have been? Would they all have originally been Zoroastrian? Is
there any evidence where they were originally located? Is there any
idea
what caused them to splinter and then spread so widely over
Central
Asia?
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