Bactria#Bactrian people

The Bactrians (also Bactrians, Ch Ta - Hia ) were an Iranian people of ancient Bactria in between the river Amu Darya ( Oxus former ) and the Hindu Kush Mountains, located in what is now northern Afghanistan.

The Bactrians are migrated as part of the Aryan ( = Iranian ) peoples in the 2nd millennium BC in the country named after them, and were settled there. They were Indo-Europeans ( Aryans ) from the so-called " satem " group, which included among other things, the Medes, Persians, Sogdians, Choresmier and the Aryan conquerors of India ( Indo-Aryans = ).

The capital of the Bactrians called Bactria, now Balkh.

History

The Bactrians were in the 7th century BC, part of the empire of the Medes and from about 550 BC the Persian Empire of the Achaemenids.

329 BC Bactria was conquered by Alexander the Great. Under Alexander about 50,000 Greeks were settled as military colonists in Bactria after his death and forced to stay there. By 239 BC they were part of the Seleucid Empire and became independent as the top layer of the Bactrian kingdom. In the aftermath, the Greeks went on in the Bactrian population. She was captured from 130 BC by the by the Huns from Eastern Turkestan displaced Yüe -chi ( Tocharians ) and their allies, such as the Sakas and Parthians by internal feuds torn kingdom. The Tocharians justified in the subsequent period the kingdom of Kushan Bactria with its center. The Kushanen merged in the subsequent period with all the Bactrians. Later, other peoples broke into this space, including the Chioniten, Kidariten and Hephthalites.

During the Kushano - Sassanian civilization the Bactrians then merged to Islamic perfectly with the neighboring Iranian peoples such as the Sogdians and the Persians.

Today, we know hardly anything about the original Bactrian culture and language. With great difficulty, specific linguistic and cultural elements can be reconstructed based on new archaeological discoveries in Afghanistan and Central Asia. We only know that they originally spoke Avestan and later a dialect of Old Persian. Herodotus reported that the Iranian tribes all speak one language, but in different dialects with distinctive features.