Sarts is a term used in some sources to refer to certain categories of the settled population of Khwarazm (from the 17th century onward)Bregel, Yu. The Sarts in the Khanate of Khiva. Journal of Asian History. Ed. Denis Sinor, Vol. 12, No. 2, Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1978, pp. 122–123. and the Fergana Valley. In different periods and localities, the term could refer to Persian-speaking populations, certain Turkicised Persian-speaking groups; artisans, broadly corresponding to the urban petty-bourgeois estate;Leonid N. Sobolev. Geographical and Statistical Information on the Zeravshan District (with an appendix listing the inhabited places of the district) // Notes of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, Department of Statistics. — St. Petersburg, 1874. — Vol. 4. — p. 299, note 1. while among the inhabitants of Samarkand Oblast in the 19th century, the word "Sart" was used in a derogatory sense.Nikolai P. Ostroumov. The Sarts: Ethnographic Materials. 2nd ed. Tashkent: Typography and Lithography of the Trading House "F. and G. Kamenksy Brothers", 1896, p. 25.
Sart is a term encountered in the history and ethnography of Persian-speaking and Central Asian societies. In the 16th century, the nomadic Uzbeks who conquered Central Asia distinguished themselves clearly from the conquered settled population, which they referred to as "Sarts" regardless of linguistic or ethnic affiliation. This designation remained in use until the 19th century and was used in the Kokand and Khivan khanates.
Following the Russian conquest of Central Asia, the term "Sart" came to be used by the administration of the Turkestan Governor-Generalship, and subsequently by the Soviet authorities until 1926. Later, the term disappeared from both official usage and everyday speech. In the 1897 Russian Empire Census, respondents were asked about their native language. According to the census results, nearly one million people identified the Sart language as their native language. The Turkestani Jadids, followers of the ideology of Islamic modernism, opposed the use of the term "Sart".
Orientalists and ethnographers of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries had no consensus or clear understanding of what the ethnographic construct of the "Sart" represented. Some held that "Sarts are Tajiks", others that "Sarts are settled inhabitants", while still others regarded them as a "mixed nationality".
Etymology The word sart is an Indo-Aryan loanword from Sanskrit sārthaḥ ('caravan') and sārthavāha ('caravan-leader' or 'merchant') into Turkic languages, via an Iranian language (probably Sogdian or Parthian sartvā) and Uyghur sartbāu. It retained its original meaning of merchant until 11th century, when it increasingly came to mean 'town-dweller', or the Iranian-speaking settled population, as opposed to the Turkic nomads. Under the Mongol Empire, the derived terms like sartaul and sartaqtai were generally applied on Iranian Muslims, making it an ethnonym.
History and geography of the use of the term Sart
Sart is a term encountered in the history and ethnography of Persian-speaking and Central Asian societies. Originally, in the Old Turkic language, the word denoted a merchant. In this sense, it occurs in 11th-century written sources, such as the encyclopedic dictionary Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk (Compendium of the Turkic Dialects) by Mahmud al-Kashgari and Kutadgu Bilig (Wisdom Which Brings Royal Glory) by Yusuf Balasaguni.
At a time when Persians controlled the trade routes leading toward the nomads, Mongols and Turks referred to Persians as Sarts or Tajiks. Since the Persians were a settled Muslim population, the term Sart was extended to all settled Muslims regardless of language or place of residence.
In the post-Mongol period, "Sart" became synonymous with "Tajik" and referred to the Persian-speaking settled or urban population, in contrast to the term "Turk", which referred to the Turkic-speaking nomadic or semi-nomadic population.
In the 16th century, the nomadic Uzbeks who conquered Central Asia distinguished themselves clearly from the conquered settled population, which they referred to as "Sarts" regardless of linguistic or ethnic affiliation. The distinction between Uzbeks and Sarts (Tajiks) was now perceived more sharply than the earlier distinction between Turks and Sarts, since some pre-Uzbek Chaghatay Turkic tribes had already adopted a settled way of life. This use of the term Sart continued until the 19th century.
The mass migration of Turkic and Turkicised Mongol nomads into Transoxiana as a result of the Uzbek invasion led to a sharp intensification of the Turkicisation of the indigenous Iranian population. By the 19th century, both the Turkicisation of the Iranians and the adoption of a settled way of life by the Uzbeks had reached an advanced stage. The term Sart, which originally denoted settled Iranians and later Persian-speaking and Turkic-speaking urban inhabitants, came to be used mainly for Turkic-speaking or bilingual urban inhabitants. At the same time, the term Tajik, previously synonymous with Sart, came to be used specifically for Persian-speaking populations. Moreover, Sarts, as urban inhabitants or agriculturalists of Bukhara and Kokand, were contrasted with the nomads known as "Kazakhs", while in Khwarazm the corresponding contrast was with Turkmens.
Although in the 19th and early 20th centuries Russian and European researchers began using the term Sart for Turkic-speaking urban inhabitants whom they regarded as the "indigenous inhabitants" of Central Asia, V. V. Bartold was sceptical of this interpretation, as he found no direct evidence for it in historical sources.
As noted by V. V. Bartold and Yuri E. Bregel, no attempts had been made to determine the dialectal differences between Sarts and Uzbeks in either Bukhara or Khiva, although such differences certainly existed and probably justified treating the Sarts as a distinct ethnic group. However, as noted by M. E. Subtelny, a professor of Persian and Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, the close symbiosis between nomadic Turks and settled Persians in Central Asia, which had existed for centuries, resulted in mutual linguistic and ethnogenetic influences, making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify distinctions between them.
In the 14th century, as a result of interaction between nomadic Turks and the settled local population in Transoxiana, a "historical-cultural complex" emerged, whose bearers, according to B. Kh. Karmysheva, came to be called Chaghatay Turks from the beginning of the 15th century. The word "Chaghatay" came to be used in a sense close to that of an ethnonym. Following the defeat of the remnants of the Timurid state by the nomadic Uzbeks in the early 16th century, the local settled population—Turks and Tajiks—continued to call themselves, in contrast to the Uzbeks, the Chaghatay people. As Karmysheva noted, "the term Chaghatay tended to expand its meaning" and to overlap with the terms "Tat" in Khorasan, "Tajik" and "Sart" in Transoxiana. The terms "Tat", "Tajik", and "Sart" were initially used to designate Iranian-speaking populations, but as Turks adopted a settled way of life and the populations of the oases came to share a common economic and domestic way of life despite linguistic differences, the terms came to be applied to the inhabitants of the cultural oases of Transoxiana and eastern Khorasan regardless of language.
In the 19th century, the term "Sart" referred to a specific ethnographic group in Fergana and Tashkent. In the central regions of Uzbekistan, primarily in the territory of the former Emirate of Bukhara, the Khorezm Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR showed that the term was rarely used or not used at all.
As Karmysheva noted, the term Sart denoted the settled population of the cultural oases and was widespread in southern Kazakhstan, Fergana, and Khwarazm. In these oases, it was also used as a self-designation by the settled population. In Iran and Khorasan, however, the term "Tat" was used. In the territories of the former Emirate of Bukhara, neither "Sart" nor "Tat" was used. Among the descendants of the Dasht-i Qipchaq Uzbeks, the equivalent of these terms was "Tajik", which they used not as an ethnonym but as a designation of a cultural type, that is, the indigenous settled population.
Sarts of the Khanate of Kokand
Rashid Nabiev, in his 1973 book From the History of the Khanate of Kokand, explained that the term "Sart" referred to the settled agricultural and urban Uzbek and Tajik population of the plains of Turkestan.
Timur Beisembiev, a historian and Orientalist specialising in Persian- and Turkic-language manuscript sources and the history of the Khanate of Kokand, studied various manuscript copies of the Kokand historiographical work Tarikh-i Shahrukhi (History of Shahrukh) by Mulla Niyaz Muhammad Khokandi in the 1980s. The work covers the entire history of the Khanate of Kokand from the beginning of the 18th century to the early 1870s.
According to Tarikh-i Shahrukhi, the ethnic composition of the Khanate of Kokand was diverse. In addition to numerous nomadic peoples, the settled inhabitants of Fergana were described as Sarts, Tajiks, and Uzbeks. According to Beisembiev, the ethnonym "Sart" (sartiyya) in Khokandi's work had both a narrow and a broader meaning, the latter denoting the entire settled population of Fergana in opposition to the nomadic population (ilatiyya).
According to Khokandi's description of the ethnic composition of the regions of the Khanate of Kokand, the settled inhabitants of the Tashkent region and Kurama were Sarts, Tajiks, and "Andis". In the domain of Ura-Tyube, the settled population consisted of Sarts and Tajiks. Analysing the primary source, Beisembiev concluded that the most numerous populations in Fergana were Sarts, Kipchaks, and Kyrgyz, while in the Tashkent region and Kurama they were Sarts, Kurama, and Kazakhs.
The first chapter of Tarikh-i Shahrukhi, in its account of the accession of Shah Rukh Khan in 1709 and the foundation of Kokand, states that numerous settlements around the site where Kokand would later be founded were inhabited by Uzbeks and Sarts.
Sarts of the Khanate of Khiva
The Orientalist Yuri E. Bregel conducted research on the subject and published a study entitled The Sarts in the Khanate of Khiva in 1978.
The main conclusions of his research were:
First, the Sarts of the Khanate of Khiva differed from the Uzbeks, at least until the first half of the 19th century. They differed in origin: the Sarts descended from the ancient settled population of Khwarazm. They differed in cultural traditions, as they were urban inhabitants or peasants. They differed geographically, as the Sarts were concentrated mainly in the southern part of the state. They also differed in social status: the Sarts were rayas, that is, a tax-paying estate, while the Uzbeks were sipahis, or warriors. There was also a distinction in the role played by their leaders in the administration of the state. Second, the term Sarts was a self-designation of this population group until 1917. The Sarts were clearly regarded by the Uzbeks as a separate ethnic group, or another people. Third, although the Sarts of Khwarazm spoke a Turkic dialect in the 19th century that was close to but distinct from the dialect of nomadic and semi-nomadic Uzbeks, there were indirect indications that they were probably bilingual and that at least some of them also used Persian or Tajik.