Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Cataphract-style parade armour of a Saka royal, also known as "The Golden Warrior", from the Issyk kurgan, a historical burial site near Almaty, Kazakhstan. Circa 400–200 BC. [5] [6] The Saka [a] were a group of nomadic Eastern Iranian peoples who lived in the Eurasian Steppe and the Tarim Basin from the 9th century BC to the 5th century AD.
Majiayuan (Ch:马家垸遗址) is an 3rd-2nd century BCE archaeological site in Gansu, China. The site is considered as belonging to rulers of the culture of the Xirong ("Western Barbarians"), recently subjugated by the state of Qin, who included them within the defensive wall of King Zhao of Qin, built in 271 BCE.
Chinese sources name the Scythian Sai (Saka), and the Yuezhi who are often identified as Tocharians, among the people of the Wusun state in the Zhetysu and Dzungaria area. [29] The Wusun realm probably included both Yuezhi and Saka. [1] It is clear that the majority of the population consisted of linguistically Iranian Saka tribes. [1]
The Saka people were known as the Sai (塞, sāi, sək in Old Sinitic) in ancient Chinese records. [33] These records indicate that they originally inhabited the Ili and Chu River valleys of modern Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. In the Chinese Book of Han, the area was called the "land of the Sai", i.e. the Saka. [34]
The Ordos are mainly known from their skeletal remains and artifacts. The Ordos culture of about 500 BCE to 100 CE is known for its "Ordos bronzes", blade weapons, finials for tent-poles, horse gear, and small plaques and fittings for clothes and horse harness, using animal style decoration with relationships both with the Scythian art of regions much further west, and also Chinese art.
Like the Scythians whom Herodotus describes in book four of his History (Saka is an Iranian word equivalent to the Greek Scythes, and many scholars refer to them together as Saka-Scythian), Sakas were Iranian-speaking horse nomads who deployed chariots in battle, sacrificed horses, and buried their dead in barrows or mound tombs called kurgans ...
[23] [24] Relations with China factored heavily in the war. In 970, after the Khotanese capture of Kashgar, an elephant was sent as tribute by Khotan to Song dynasty China. [25] After the Qara Khanid Turkic Muslims defeated the Khotanese under Yusuf Qadir Khan at or before 1006, China received a tribute mission in 1009 from the Muslims. [26]
The Shule Kingdom (Chinese: 疏勒) was an ancient oasis kingdom of the Taklamakan Desert that was on the Northern Silk Road, in the historical Western Regions of what is now Xinjiang in Northwest China. Its capital was Kashgar, [1] the source of Kashgar's water being a river of the same name.