Bactrians
The Bactrians (also Bactrians , Ch. Ta-Hia ) were an Iranian people of antiquity in Bactria between the river Amu Darya , the ancient Oxus, and the Hindu Kush -Gebirge, in what is now northern Afghanistan located. The capital of the Bactrians was called Baktra , today's Balkh .
The Bactrians are part of the Aryan or Iranian peoples in the 2nd millennium BC. Immigrated to the country named after them and settled there. They were Indo-Europeans from the so-called " Satem " group, which also included the Medes , Persians , Sogdians , Choresmians and the Aryan conquerors of India ( Indo-Aryans ).
history
Bactria was founded in the 7th century BC. Chr. Part of the empire of the Medes and from approximately v 550th Chr. Part of the Persian Empire of the Achaemenids .
329 BC Bactria was conquered by Alexander the Great . Under Alexander, around 50,000 Greeks were settled as military colonists in Bactria and forced to stay there after his death. Until 239 BC They belonged to the Seleucid Empire and then became independent as the upper class of the Greco-Bactrian Empire . In the period that followed, the Greeks became part of the Bactrian population. Their empire, torn by internal feuds, became from 130 BC onwards. Conquered by the Yüe-chi ( Tocharer ) and their allies, such as the Sakas and Parthians, who were displaced from East Turkestan . The Tocharer founded the kingdom of the Kushana with Bactria as the center. The Kushans also merged completely with the Bactrians in the period that followed. Later other peoples invaded this area, including the Chionites , Kidarites , Alchon and Nezak groups, and the Hephthalites .
During the Kushano-Sassanid civilization, the Bactrians then merged completely with the neighboring Iranian peoples such as the Sogdians and the Persians until Islamization .
Today we hardly know anything about the original Bactrian culture and language. Certain linguistic and cultural elements can only be reconstructed with difficulty on the basis of new archaeological discoveries in Afghanistan and Central Asia . We only know that they originally spoke Avestian and later a dialect of Old Persian . Herodotus reports that the Iranian tribes all speak one language, but in different dialects with peculiar characteristics.