Sacaraucae Erotic

The Sacaraucae were a Saka nomad people of the Central Asian steppe, active in the second and first centuries BC between the Syr Darya and the Oxus, who helped end Greek rule in Bactria, meddled in the Parthian succession, and then disappeared as a named group, their survivors most likely absorbed into the Saka populations that settled Sistan and pushed on toward northwestern India. Nobody today claims descent from them by name. What survives is a handful of lines in Greek and Latin authors, and the consequences of what they did. The ancients knew them less by a territory than by a role. Strabo lists them, in the garbled form Sacarauli, with the Asii, Pasiani and Tochari as the nomads who came from beyond the Jaxartes and took Bactria from the Greeks around the 130s BC. The surviving summaries of Pompeius Trogus pair them with the Asiani as the conquerors of Bactra and Sogdiana. The push started further east: the Yuezhi, beaten by the Xiongnu, had moved west and knocked loose the Saka groups in their path. The Sacaraucae were one link in that chain reaction.

Parthia took the next blow. Two Parthian kings died fighting steppe invaders within a few years of each other, and although Mithridates II restored the frontier, the Sacaraucae remained strong enough that around 77 BC they put the aged exile Sinatruces on the Parthian throne. A text handed down under Lucian's name says he was eighty when they brought him home. After that the record goes quiet. Trogus notes, without detail, the destruction of the Saraucae, in the same breath as the Asiani becoming kings of the Tochari, which many historians read as the rise of the Kushans. They spoke a Saka language of the Eastern Iranian branch, kin to the Khotanese later written down in the Tarim Basin and, more distantly, to Pashto and Ossetian. They left no texts of their own, and even their name reaches us only in foreign spellings whose meaning is still argued over. Like other Sakas they were herders and mounted archers who moved with horses, flocks and wagons and buried their leaders under earthen mounds. Their legacy is on the map. Sistan, the borderland of Iran and Afghanistan, still carries the old name Sakastan, land of the Sakas, and the Indo-Scythian kings who struck coins in Gandhara and the Punjab came out of the same migration. Whether any particular dynasty was Sacaraucae by blood is beyond what the sources can tell us.