259 : 21. Sacæ or Saka. The Sacæ or Saka were the blond peoples who carried the Aryan language to India. Strabo, 511, allies them with the Scythians as one of their tribes. Many tribes were called Sacæ, especially by the Hindus, who used the term indiscriminately to designate any northern invaders of India.
One tribe gained the most fertile tract in Armenia which was called Sacasene, after them.
Zaborowski, 1, p. 94, relates the Sacæ with the Scythians, and says: “The Tadjiks are a people composed of suppressed elements where blonds are found in an important minority. These blonds, saving an atavistic survival of more ancient or sporadic characters I can identify. They are the Sacæ.” He continues, in a note, that a great error has been committed on the subject of the Sacæ. “Repeating an assertion of Alfred Maury, whose very sound erudition enjoyed a merited reputation, I myself once repeated that the Sacæ who figures on the rock of Behistun was of the Kirghiz type. This assertion is completely erroneous. I have proved it and can say that the Sacæ and the Scythians were identical.”
Zaborowski, p. 216, also identifies the Sacæ with the Persians. On this whole subject see Herodotus, VII, 64; also Feist, 5.
259 : 21. Massagetæ. Zaborowski, 1, p. 285, says: “The first information of history concerning the peoples of Turkestan refers to the Massagetæ, whose life was exactly the same as that of the Scythians (Herodotus, I, 205–216). They enjoyed a developed industrial civilization while they remained nomads. They were doubtless composed of ethnic elements different from the Scythians, but probably already spoke the Iranian tongue, like them. And since the time of Darius, at least, there were in Turkestan with them and beside them, Sacæ, whom the Greeks have always regarded as Scythians come from Europe.”
Minns, Scythians and Greeks, p. 11, says: “The Scyths and the Massagetæ were contemporaneous and different. The Massagetæ are evidently a mixed collection of tribes without an ethnic unity; the variety of their customs and states of culture shows this and Herodotus does not seem to suggest that they are all one people. They are generally reckoned to be Iranian.... The picture drawn of the nomad Massagetæ seems very like that of the Scythians in a rather ruder stage of development.”
Herodotus, I, 215, describes them as follows: “In their dress and mode of living the Massagetæ resemble the Scythians. They fight both on horseback and on foot, neither method is strange to them.... The following are some of their customs,—each man has but one wife, yet all wives are held in common; for this is a custom of the Massagetæ and not of the Scythians, as the Greeks wrongly say. Human life does not come to its natural close with this people; but when a man grows very old, all his kinsfolk collect together and offer him up in sacrifice; offering at the same time some cattle also. After the sacrifice they boil the flesh and feast on it; and those who thus end their days are reckoned the happiest. If a man dies of disease they do not eat him, but bury him in the ground, bewailing his ill fortune that he did not come to be sacrificed. They sow no grain, but live on their herds and on fish, of which there is great plenty in the Araxes. Milk is what they chiefly drink. [Cf. the eastern Siberian tribes of the present day.] The only god they worship is the sun, and to him they offer the horse in sacrifice, under the notion of giving to the swiftest of the gods, the swiftest of all mortal creatures.”
D’Arbois de Jubainville, 4, t. I, p. 231 declares they were the same as the Scyths.
Horse sacrifices are said to prevail among the modern Parses. On the whole, the Massagetæ appear to have been largely Nordic.
259 : 24. Kirghizes. See Zaborowski, 1, pp. 216, 290–291.