Sarten

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Sarten (Sārt) was an ethnological term for the Turkish-speaking, settled population in the Russian-dominated part of Central Asia, which was mainly used in the 19th century and fell out of use in the first half of the 20th century.

Etymology and history of the term

The word Sārt , traceable in the Turkish literary language of Central Asia since the days of Mahmud al-Kāschgharī and Qutadgu Bilig, originally meant something like merchant . It is regarded as a loan word from Sanskrit and is derived from "sārthavāha" meaning "caravan leader". In Old Turkish it appears for the first time in the form “sartbav” in the translation of a Buddhist sutra and is declared there as the “leader of the merchants”. It is believed that the word got into Old Turkish through the mediation of Sogdic .

It then evolved in the time of the Mongolian Great Empire and the post-Mongol period on the importance Tajik and in derivatives for Muslim detectable.

Ethnological background of the term

In the areas of Central Asia conquered by the Russian Empire in the 19th century, written records began to be passed on to a population that mainly used Iranian idioms. Since the 2nd century BC, more and more peoples have poured into this area from the northern and eastern steppe area, whose ethnicity is often unclear and controversial. While the first wave of this kind from the middle of the 2nd century BC onwards were peoples whose Iranian language was practically not in doubt, from the 6th century AD the Turkish ethnicity of the immigrants can no longer be doubted, because they also appear under this name. While the steppe nomads were now exclusively of Turkish ethnicity, Iranian languages, namely Sogdian, remained predominant among the settled population . The upper class, however, acculturated to the aristocracy of the steppe peoples, so that under the name “Turks” there are obviously also Iranian-speaking people. For example, a Muslim author believes that the language of the Turks is no different from that of Khorasan .

Two linguistic developments have been active in these areas since the Islamic conquest:

  • the displacement of the Central Asian local Iranian idioms by the neo-Persian and
  • the subsequent gradual displacement of the remnants of these idioms and the New Persian by Turkish

The origins of New Persian are also seen in a pidgin language , which Turkish was also involved in developing from Middle Persian . Before the Russian conquest, Persian was used as an educational and literary language, which was also used in the official sphere, as well as various Turkic dialects, which formed a dialect continuum with local varieties, but without direct ethnic classification , by the sedentary and nomadic population . In addition, there was a supra-local Turkish literary language since the early Middle Ages, which in modern Turkology is called Karakhanid (11th - 12th century), Khorezm Turkish (13th - 14th century) and Chagatai Turkish (from the 15th century) be occupied. The linguistic differences that are expressed in this change of name are not only due to the development of the language over time, but also to a considerable extent to the fact that in the course of time the language of a different geographical political center has always shaped the style.

As a result of immigration from the steppe region, reinforced by the conquests of the Mongolian empire of Genghis Khan and his successors, Turkish had become the predominant language in Mawara'annahr , Khorezmia / Chwārizm and the areas adjacent to the north from the 16th century .

The use of the term from the Uzbek conquest

After the Uzbeks had conquered Mawarannahr and Chwārizm in the 16th century , they referred to the subjugated sedentary population, whether Iranian or Turkic-speaking, as Sārt . While originally the names Sarte and Tajik were congruent, then the term began Sarte increasingly only the turksprachliche settled population to call, while the differentiation between the long-established, sedentary Turkic-speaking population and the immigrant Uzbeks began increasingly to blur because the Uzbeks were settled and acculturated.

In the course of the Russian conquest of Central Asia and during the tsarist rule in Central Asia, the Russian colonial administration then used the term Sarten as an ethnic term for the Turkic-speaking, settled population of Central Asia, especially in Ferghana and the Syrdarya region, which was made up of the Persian-speaking ethnic group of the Tajiks got divorced.

The opinions of Russian orientalists differed as to how the population known as Sarten was to be qualified. Some saw in them members of the Turkish population who were originally Iranian, while others saw them as a genuinely Turkic Congolese population. In the area of ​​Bukhara the name "Sarte" was frowned upon by the population, also because of the folk etymological derivation of sarı it (in German: "yellow dog"), but the Russian side took journalistic action against the self-designation of these groups as "Turk", because a merger with the Ottoman Turks was feared. The developing native intelligentsia also opposed the use of this ethnic designation.

Abandonment of the term in the early 20th century

For the first time in the census of 1917 an attempt was made to dispense with the designation "Sarte" by equating Uzbeks and Sarten. In the course of the political order of Central Asia according to national points of view, the parts of the population previously known as Sarten began to be understood as Uzbeks, following the indigenous intelligentsia and classify. When the national republics of the Uzbeks and Turkmens were founded in 1925, the population previously known as Sarten was added to the Uzbeks. In the 1926 census, a Sartian nationality was no longer included in the questionnaires. The Sarten disappeared from history.

swell

  • W. Barthold and ME Subtelny: Sārt in: Encyclopaedia of Islam , Second Edition, editors: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, CE Bosworth, E. van Donzel, WP Heinrichs. Online version, accessed October 14, 2018
  • Sergej N. Abašin: The species problem in Russian historiography of the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th century. Klaus Schwarz Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-87997-645-4
  • Ingeborg Baldauf: Some Thoughts on the Making of the Uzbek Nation. In: Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique. 32, No. 1 1991, pp. 79-95 ( online )

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ W.Barthold and ME Subtelny: Sart in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition
  2. ↑ Sören Stark: The Old Turkish Period in Central and Central Asia. Archaeological and historical studies. Ludwig Reichert, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-89500-532-9 , pp. 258-260
  3. ↑ Vasilij V. Bartol'd: Twelve Lectures on the History of the Turks of Central Asia 2nd, unchanged. Ed., Reprint of the 1932/35 edition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1962, p. 59
  4. ↑ Vasilij V. Bartol'd: Twelve Lectures on the History of the Turks of Central Asia 2nd, unchanged. Ed., Reprint of the 1932/35 edition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1962, p. 45
  5. ↑ Bo Utas: A multiethnic origin of New Persian? In: Lars Johanson and Christiane Bulut (eds.). Turkic-Iranian Contact Areas. Historical and Linguistic Aspects. Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 3-447-05276-7 ( Turcologica . Vol. 62), pp. 241-251.
  6. ↑ Mecdut Mansuroglu: The Karakhanidische. In: Jean Deny et al. (Ed.). Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta: Tomus Primus. [Turkic languages]. Steiner, Wiesbaden 1959, pp. 87-112
  7. ↑ Klaus Röhrborn: Pan-Turkishism and linguistic unity of the Turkish peoples. In: Klaus Heller and Herbert Jelitte (eds.). The middle Volga region, past and present. Lang, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-631-46921-7 ( Contributions to Slavic Studies . 22), pp. 153-175, 154-156
  8. ↑ Sergej N. Abašin: The species problem in Russian historiography of the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th century. Klaus Schwarz Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-87997-645-4 , p. 115
  9. ↑ Sergej N. Abašin: The species problem in Russian historiography of the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th century. Klaus Schwarz Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-87997-645-4 , p. 79
  10. ↑ Sergej N. Abašin: The species problem in Russian historiography of the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th century. Klaus Schwarz Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-87997-645-4 , p. 88
  11. ↑ Sergej N. Abašin: The species problem in Russian historiography of the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th century. Klaus Schwarz Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-87997-645-4 , p. 108 ff.