"For information on the town in Hiroshima, Japan, see Saka, Hiroshima.

The Sakas or Saka race was a group of people who lived in present day Uzbekistan around 3000 BC. These Sakas followed other Aryans into present day Iran, and returned back to their original area in Central Asia.

According to some, then, this Saka race with an affiliated tribe under a different name emigrated to northern Europe, into the area of the Baltic Sea (Sakas are considered to be the ancestors of Scythians by many scholars). This Saka race and especially their affiliated tribe whose name is more correlated to the word Saxon, gave rise (supposedly) to the Saxons tribe in the area of present day Germany. This claim was cited in favour of Nazi claims that they were the "original descendants of the Aryan race". Most contemporary philologists are divided on this issue, debating on the archaeological evidences for major cultural contacts between anyone in Uzbekistan or Iran and the Baltic area. But many Germans believe that there was a connection between the people in the central Asia region and their German ancestors, who were migrants from the East; this is in contrast to the French ethnologist Monsieur H. Hubert's belief that suggested that the blond-haired people came from the Atlas mountains of Morrocco, and this blond people migrated out of Morrocco, moving northward along the Atlantic sea shore all the way to the Baltic lake during the European Ice Age, surviving all the way by living on seafood along the Euro-Atlantic coast line, which is known to have large historic deposits of sea shells in man-made open-air depots. On the other hand, Paul Perzon ardently supports the previous theory, claiming that Sakas are the ancestors of Scythians, Cimmerians/Gomers and ultimately Celts (claiming that Celts and Germans were originally the same nations and Germans fled the Baltic area when it was flooded by the rising sea level after the Ice age, since the German tribe Cimbri are thought to be descended from a branch of the Cimmerians). In the Babylonian, the Saka were called the Gimirri; in the Assyrian language they were referred to as the Khumri or Bit-Khumri, or Cimmerians by the Greeks and Romans.

In other Babylonian and Assyrian monuments and tablets the conquests of the Khumri and their eventual captivity were chronicled. The Khumri were also called the Bit-omri or the House of Omri, one of the kings of the northern tribes of the kingdom of Israel.

Some researchers have argued that both Celts and the Germans came from an area south-east of the Black Sea, and migrated westward to the coast of Europe.

According to the hypothesis, the Saka-Scythians migrated west starting with the reign of the Persian King Cyrus the Great, when they declined to help him in his conquest of the Babylonian empire. Herodotus says they were called "Germanii" at that point in time. The Greeks called the Scythians Sakae and Scyths. When the Saxons invaded England in 400 AD, their chroniclers said they "sent back to Scythia for reinforcements." The implication is that the Saxons considered themselves to be Scythians, the name having travelled with them even though they were far away from the region the Greeks had labelled "Scythia". The English are known to be descended from the Anglo-Saxons.

The burial customs of the Scythians and Vikings also show similarities, for which some have argued a common origin in support of the theory.

The Sakas or Shakyas were also one of several tribes that conquered India from the northwest. The Indian National Calendar starts from the first year of the Saka Era, 78 CE.

Genetics:About 50% of Slavs and Balts,and about 30% of Central Europeans share the same Y chromosome (R1a) with 50% of the people of the Indus Valley. [1],[2],[3] [4]

References

• Bailey, H. W. 1958. "Languages of the Saka." Handbuch der Orientalistik, I. Abt., 4. Bd., I. Absch., Leiden-Köln. 1958.

• Davis-Kimball, Jeannine. 2002. Warrior Women: An Archaeologist's Search for History's Hidden Heroines. Warner Books, New York. 1st Trade printing, 2003. ISBN 0-446-67983-6 (pbk).

• P’iankov, I. V. 1994. "The Ethnic History of the Sakas." Bulletin of the Asia Institute: The Archaeology and Art of Central Asia. Studies From the Former Soviet Union. New Series. Edited by B. A. Litvinskii and Carol Altman Bromberg. Translation directed by Mary Fleming Zirin. Vol. 8, (1994), pp. 37-46.[5]

• Pulleyblank, Edwin G. 1970. "The Wu-sun and Sakas and the Yüeh-chih Migration." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 33 (1970), pp. 154-160.

• Puri, B. N. 1994. "The Sakas and Indo-Parthians." In: History of civilizations of Central Asia, Volume II. The development of sedentary and nomadic civilizations: 700 B.C. to A.D. 250. Harmatta, János, ed., 1994. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, pp. 191-207.

• Thomas, F. W. 1906. "Sakastana." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1906), pp. 181-216.

• Yu, Taishan. 1998. A Study of Saka History. Sino-Platonic Papers No. 80. July, 1998. Dept. of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

• Yu, Taishan. 2000. A Hypothesis about the Source of the Sai Tribes. Sino-Platonic Papers No. 106. September, 2000. Dept. of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

External links

• [6]
• [7]