Scytho-Iranian theory
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In the pre-1700’s, the Scythians were known from the works of the ancient writers, principally Herodotus. At that time, the accepted wisdom was that the Herodotus’ Scythians were the precursors of Türks, with the Türks branching into Slavic, Mongol, Finnish, Baltic, Ugrian, and unspecified other variations. There was a millennia-long string of historical references specifically linking Herodotus’ Scythians with various Türkic tribes, e.g. Huns, Türks, Khazars atc., so there was no need to question this postulate. That is, untill young Russia expanded its control to the N.Pontic belt, kurgans and their contents became known, and the question of their attribution came to the attention of the Western scientists. Archeological discoveries in the 19th c. showed that Herodotus and other historians faithfully recorded specks of the history of the Eurasian peoples.
At about 1805 a Polish aristocratJan Potocki in Russian service assigned Heinrich Julius von Klaproth (1783-1835) for an ethnographic journey to the recently seized N. Caucasus. Von Klaproth who published a work "Reise in den Kaukasus und nach Georgien unternommen in den Jahren 1807 und 1808" (I-II, Halle and Berlin 1812-14); in an appendix, entitled "Kaukasische Sprachen", von Klaproth for the first time formulated a hypothesis of Scytho-Sarmatian origin of Ossetic language. In his later work, "Memoire dans lequel on prouve 1'identite des Ossetes, peuplade du Caucase, avec les Alains du moyen-age" (Nouvelles annales des voyages 16, 1822, p. 243-56), von Klaproth completed the sequence Scytho-Sarmatians > Alans > Ossetes.
The Scytho-Ossetian hypothesis was furthered by K. Zeiss in a work published in the 1837 in Munich with suggestion to identify Scythians with Persian-lingual tribes based on religion, territory of Persians and the common Scythian and Persian words. By efforts of Vs.Miller and V.I.Abayev these results were finally narrowed to exclusively Ossetic language as a successor of the Scythian. More than that, Iranian attribution of the Scythian language has been confirmed by research of M.Fasmer and V.I.Abaev (Abaev V.I.,1965). In the development of the Scytho-Iranian hypothesis "concept about Iranian language of Scythians dominates unconditionally. Anything that does not advance this thesis is excluded beforehand from the area of Scythian studies" (Petrov V.P., 1968).
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