--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
> Recent excavations near Samarkand have unearthed a "Scythian
> friendship goblet" (similar to depictions on Pontic vases and
> statements in Herodotus) with names inscribed. One has been
> deciphered as "Oshyan" ('ws"y'n) (="favoured by Dawn") and is
> deemed "la plus ancienne inscription sogdienne" by Frantz Grenet.
Frantz Grenet's article discussing this find is available online at
http://www.transoxiana.org/Eran/Articles/grenet.html
> Ushah ['Dawn'] was the Avestan Goddess of the Morning. I was
> wondering if this "Osh" in the Sogdian name could be related to the
> Alan ethnonym, which would then mean something like "(those) of
> the east"...
I wouldn't think so. The Alans' self-given ethnonym (one of two
known ones) was A:s (with long /a/). I don't readily see how Sogdian
<'ws^-> (Romanicized as "Osh") 'dawn' could have turned its /'w/
phonemic segment into /a:/ in another Iranian language. You may have
been led astray here by the existence of an ethnonym Os for the
Ossetes of the Caucasus, which is, however, peculiar to Georgian
only (where it alternates with the form Ovs). That's not the
original tribal self-designation of the Alans.
See my message, copied from the indo-iranian List, which I posted as
an indirect reply to your original query forwarded there by Torsten:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/indo_iranian/message/1972
<< A:s of medieval Muslim (Arab, Persian) sources, As (pl. Asut) in
Mongol (whence the form A-su occurring in Chinese chronicles of the
Yuan period), Os ~ Ovs in Georgian, Ia:s (Ya:s, Ja'sz) in Slavonic
and Hungarian, Jas of Old Russian chronicles, are all derivatives of
the tribal self-designation of the Alans, A:s, which they used in
alternation with another tribal self-desigantion of theirs derived
from Proto-Indo-Iranian *arya, from which the various forms
(Greek, Chinese etc.) of the ethnonym 'Alan' (Engl.) are derived.
H W Bailey derives the Iranian tribal name A:s from an earlier form
*a:rsya (cf. Pliny's Arsi, Ptolemy's Arsitis and, in the medieval
period, Al-Masudi's al-(l)a:risiya ~ al-arsiya, the Khazar guards
recruited from a class of natives of Khwarazm) and makes the A:s
the descendants of the Asioi or Asii (Pompeius Trogus' Asiani), an
Eastern Iranian tribe who, according to Strabo, had conquered
Bactria and who, in Bailey's views, were the same as the
Arsi/Arsitis. Bailey, however, doesn't apparently give any
etymology for his posited proto-form *a:rsya. This is very
disappointing! :^(
You will find a lot of clues on the origin of the ethnonym A:s at
http://www.iranica.com/newsite/articles/v1f8/v1f8a013.html
(V I Abaev & H W Bailey's article on Alans in the Encyclopaedia
Iranica)
and at
http://www.kroraina.com/sarm/jh/jh3_1.html
(J Harmatta's very detailed discussion of all the sources available
before 1970 as far as the problem of the origin of the ethnonym A:s
is concerned) >>
Harmatta's discussion is very illuminating!
Best wishes,
Francesco