Done & buried
Saka tombs in Iran
May 31, 2005
iranian.com
In "The
Saka Legacy" I explored the origin of place-names like
Sakkiz, Arsaka (Quchan), Zadrakarta (Sa-karta, Gorgan), Sakastan
(Sistan) and Sakavand (in Bamiyan/Sistan). That exercise relied
in part on the geographical distribution of Saka in west-central,
north-northeast and east-central Iran. In this essay, I exploit
the same information in order to call attention to evidence of
Saka burial grounds in Gorgan and Sistan.
As described in Herodotus (Histories, Rawlinson’s edition),
the Saka who inhabited in the Balkan and Black Sea regions (Scythians)
considered no cause greater than to put up a fight in defense of
their ancestral burial mounds. A pastoral and nomadic population,
they had on purpose no cities or cultivated lands to defend, and
so these ancestral tombs were their only “structures.” Perhaps
the elaboration and labor that went into their construction rendered
their defense more than just a matter of spiritual call to arms
(IV:71-75, 127). The gory details of the burial mound fit for a
Saka king explains why such mounds took up considerable real estate.
The Saka tombs that have been discovered from Central Asia to and
beyond southeast Europe have provided much knowledge euro-centric
information about the Scythians.
The Saka were a part of the Iranian scene form pre-Achaemenian
through Parthian times. They inhabited primarily in west-central,
north-central and east-central regions of ancient Iran. Therefore,
if they died where they once had lived, some Saka legacy should
be found in the form of burial grounds in these regions. This logic
and other factors led the archeologist Roman Ghirshman to conjecture
that the remains of a treasure discovered by two peasants near
Sakkiz in 1940’s came from a tomb or cache belonging to the
Saka leader Partatua or his son Madyes (Iran, p. 106).
Ghirshman was not the first to suspect some connection between
antiquities finds in Iran and Saka. A thinly veiled suspicion of
this nature is found in a statement by the English traveler William
Holmes (Sketches on the Shores of the Caspian, 1845). On the road
from Amol to Farahabad on the Caspian shore, Holmes (p. 224) saw
a large grassy mound and wrote that this was the first he had seen
of those tappeh (hill) that “frequently occur in Mauzunderoon,
Astrabad, and the Toorcoman desert.”
 Riding inland from Farahabad,
Holmes (pp. 230-231) came upon Qara Tappeh and not far from it
was a similar hillock rising abruptly from the plain but not surrounded
by habitation. “The natives,” he wrote, “can
give no satisfactory information with regards to these mounds.
It is very evident that they are not natural elevations; and it
is probable they may be the burial-places of the ancient Kings
of Hyrcania.”
Here is the clincher -- “Herodotus,” Holmes
noted, “details at full length the mode of sepulture of the
ancient Kings of Scythia ... [which was] covered with a lofty mound
of earth. The same custom may have prevailed here.” W. B.
Fisher (“Physical Geography,” in Cambridge History
of Iran, vol. 1, 1968) however believed that the feature recognized
as tappeh were once settlements that fell into ruins.
The plains east and north of Gorgan from Qara Sue to Gorgan River
(Dasht) and from Gorgan River to Atrak River (Torkaman-sahra) are
punctuated by many “out-of-place looking hills. In Gorgan
va Dasht (Tehran: Taab-e Ketab, 1344/1966), Asad-Allah Moini identified
Qara Tappeh, Qizil Tappeh, Altun Tappeh and Tuqmaq Tappeh as examples
of artificial hills.
In 1954 a researcher from northern Iran named Taheri Shahab described
the tappeh as the handiwork of the Daha tribesmen of southeast
corner of the Caspian Sea, who, in the words of Tamara Talbot Rice,
were kin of the Saka. The Daha built these mounds in a parallel
fashion and at irregular distances. These were of two types: One
type served as household and the other housed the animals and belongings.
To alert one another of danger of raids, the Daha used the mound-tops
to signal by fire at night and by smoke at daytime. “Not
much scientific study has been devotes to these tappeh” wrote
Shahab, “and every now and then one comes upon a stoneware
or metal artifact, skeletal remains and pottery.”
According to Seyyid Mohammad Kazem Maddah, these artificial dirt
mounds or hills number 39 and support some 310 excavation sites,
with some finds dating to 3000-1000 BC [“Turang Tappeh,” in
Asad-Allah Imadi, ed., Bazkhani-i Tarikh-i Mazandaran (Sari: Farhangkhaneh
Mazandaran, 1372/1994). The excavation of the tomb at Turang Tappeh
however predated the arrival of foreign archeologists to the region
in the 1950s and 1960s by a good one hundred years, when Mahmud
Nasser Khan, the governor of Astarabad, opened the tomb and off-ed
with its contents.
Not unexpectedly one should suspect the existence of Saka burial
mounds in the Sistan-Hilmand region as well. The Saka presence
there in antiquity is a matter of established historical record.
In as late as the 10th century the Persian geographer Estakhri
referred to a tribe named Khalj that was originally from Central
Asia and who had arrived in ancient times and settled in the area
between India and Sistan. There they built sepulcher (aramghah,
mausoleum -- named after the Persian satrap Maosolus).
The word
that Estakhri uses to describe the Khalj is Trkan, which we tend
to pronounce as Torkan or Turkan. I tend to think that this combination
of letters (trkan) probably sounded Tarkan and could have referred
to one riding on horseback (viz. tark-e asp) regardless
of a specific ethnic content -- applicable equally to Iranian and
Turkic horsemen
originating from Central Asia.
 It is appropriate that this fourth in as many essays on the Saka
be about their tombs, to signal an end of a long journey for me.
I have in the works a fifth and final piece that I will offer in
tribute to the Saka, as an epitaph, in which I shall pay homage
to Saka Tigraxauda (Saka the Tall Caps) and state my reasons for
why they were called Saka by the Achaemenians, indeed that the
word “sa” in Old Persian meant pasture, grassland.
In the course of researching and reading about Saka, I also came
to love them as who they were and what they did. In the process,
I developed a whole new appreciation for what it must mean to be
Iranian. That subject will be treated in my next essay.
About
Guive Mirfendereski is VP and GC at Virtual Telemetry Corporation
since 2004 and is the artisan doing business as Guy
vanDeresk (trapworks.com).
Born in Tehran in 1952, he is a graduate of Georgetown University's
College of Arts and Sciences (BA),
Tufts University's Fletcher School (PhD, MALD, MA) and Boston
College Law School (JD). He is the author of A
Diplomatic History of the Caspian Sea (2001) >>> Features
in iranian.com
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